BIOGRAPHY
Henna Laininen, born 1980 in Espoo, Finland
Henna Laininen is a visual artist and a doctoral student at the Academy of Fine Arts (Uniarts Helsinki). She is specialized in community art and environmental questions. She often works with researchers and artists from other disciplines to compose polyphonic stories.
In her artistic research project Luova yhteisöllinen kirjoittaminen voimavarana ympäristökriisissä (“Collective Creative Writing as a Resource in the Environmental Crisis”) (2017–) she investigates how to support the process of learning a sustainable lifestyle by the means of collective creative writing in the context of contemporary art. By collective creative writing she means writing in interaction with both the human and the non-human, for example site specific texts written in a certain place and weather conditions, and texts written together as a group.
The research is based on an assumption that acknowledging one ´s emotions by writing can make space for hope and environmentally-conscious action. In the first part of her research, the project Climate Change in Me (2018–2022), Laininen investigated bodily feelings related to climate change and developed creative writing based tools for dealing with eco-emotions. The artistic part of the project, In the Meltwaters sound art series and Feeling the Climate discussion, invited the audience to listen to a fellow person’s experience of climate change. The pedagogical part of the project, the Climate Change in Me creative writing workshops and online educational material, opened up space for sharing personal experiences in a group by writing and discussing.
In the second part of her research Laininen proceeded from emotions to action. In the community art project My Climate Skills (2019–2021) she got to know people in Finland who attempt to practice a sustainable way of life in changing climate conditions. She learned skills required for more sustainable lifestyle under their guidance and produced a radio documentary series My Climate Skills and online teaching materials about the experience. In the fictional part of the project, the sound walk performance The Archive of a Sustainable Culture (2022), the audience was invited to time travel to the future, to listen to audio archive fragments of a sustainable culture found in the forest. Laininen collected material for the sound walk performance by teaching a creative writing course for ten sustainable lifestyle learners around Finland. She will compile her findings in the research publication Collective Creative Writing as a Resource in the Environmental Crisis (2026). During her research process Laininen co-operates with environmental experts and Finnish eco-villages and she consults the BIOS research unit.
Laininen is also teaching creative writing, including many genres such as essay and ecological science fiction. Her poems have been published in anthologies and she has won several poetry prizes in Finland such as J.H. Erkko prize 2005. In the year 2008 she was the Finnish candidate in the poetry slam competition The International Slam Revue in Berlin. She lives and works currently in Espoo.
