Silent Legacy (2025). Directors: Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas, Finland

The movie Silent Legacy is a personal and intimate documentary about the life of dancer and choreographer Sibiry Konaté, based in Finland. Focusing on everyday life of Sibiry, the movie simultaneously presents intersections of identity, migration, dancing professionality, parenting, loneliness and friendship.

Most importantly, it invites us into the transnational life of Sibiry and unfolds tensions related to remittances – transfer of money or goods – back to Burkina Faso. Hence, the movie navigates on personal but also societal levels, revealing the silent legacy of monetary burdens connecting African diaspora members in Europe.

In the words of Sibiry: “It is a shadow of colonialism”. When you migrate to Europe, your position changes and what people see in you is money. This entails that you are expected to bring back money when you go to Western countries. As Sibiry notes: “Everybody relies on you so it’s a heavy burden”.

Behind the underlying burden of coloniality, the movie is visually beautiful, incorporating scenes from Tiene, Sibiry’s village in Burkina Faso. We see children dancing and playing, we hear the sounds of animals and can sense the dust in the sand.

These scenes are interwoven with Sibiry dancing in various contexts—against the white snow representing Finland, in an elevator, and in a white suit while spreading money—insightfully and sensitively illustrating how he navigates different spaces and positions in his transnational life.

Lost between two continents?

There is, from my white, Finnish, perspective a sadness in a legacy you cannot leave behind, a legacy that follows you around in your everyday life. This phenomenon is well pictured in the movie through voice messages from friends and family hoping for money.

Having lived in Finland for a long time, the sense of belonging to his village in Burkina Faso has changed. It becomes clear that the Sibiry who left Tiene is no longer welcome as the boy he once was, and that he is not able to go back living in Tiene as the Sibiry he was before moving to the West. Now, he is what he himself refers to as “a god from the land of white people”, everybody wants something from him.

There is, from my white, Finnish, perspective a sadness in a legacy you cannot leave behind, a legacy that follows you around in your everyday life. This phenomenon is well pictured in the movie through voice messages from friends and family hoping for money.

This movie contributes to unfolding various complexities in life, as Sibiry is partly an African decent migrant in Finland, struggling in a system with structural racism and partly a privileged European in the eyes of the Tienes relatives and friends. As he states:

“You’re lost between two countries, two continents”

In order to somewhat fulfill the request from friends and family, and perhaps also still the flow of requests of money, Sibiry plans to ship a van from Finland to Burkina Faso. In the burden of doing correctly, he ponders if sending a van can be perceived as showing off – or if the villagers will think the van is not good enough. We see how he negotiates on renovations of the van in Finland, packs the van full with necessities and then ships it to the African continent.

“This bus could bring big changes to Tiene”

Eventually the van does not make it to Sibirys’s village as due to various struggles and setbacks. In the movie, these moments and struggles are brilliantly filmed through the scene of the van, in a dark background, without its engine. Symbolically, the black hole where the engine once sat resonates with the feeling Sibiry might have; this is the thank you get for saving money to buy a van and shipping it to Burkina Faso – getting betrayed.

African remittance legacy

Situating the movie and Sibiry’s experiences in a larger perspective, Sibiry is part of the African diaspora in the Nordic countries. As noted by the United Nations, the amount of remittances to African countries has grown during the past years, due to a larger African diaspora but also due to mobile options for sending remittances.

Remittances from African diaspora members have a great impact on African economy, from macro structures such as larger companies to microstructures of households and neighborhoods. However, it appears that the report does not address the negative sides of remittances, the dark sides of monetary bounds that are well documented in the movie.

According to recent research, remittances also appear to increase conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at individual experiences of remittance senders, research highlights socio-cultural norms, such as ubuntu, creating tensions and pressure among migrants to send money “back home”, while simultaneously settling in the host country.

The amount of remittances to African countries has grown during the past years, due to a larger African diaspora but also due to mobile options for sending remittances.

In the movie, we see Sibiry working at Posti and as a cleaner, picturing the precarious situation when it comes to employment for migrants of African descent in Finland. Due to structural challenges in the Finnish job market, such as employment and recruitment discrimination or unnecessary high language requirements, working in precarious positions at low paid jobs is something many migrants end up doing.

Personally, I feel this is such a waste of Sibiry’s dancing talent and feel sad for living in a society not appreciating the dancing expertise Sibiry brings to Finland. Ten years ago, I took part in Sibiry’s afro dance classes and recalled thinking that he should be teaching experts. And so he has been, but still, I cannot but feel frustration against attitudes in the job market in Finland.

“I came here to dance”

“For me dancing is freedom”

From my perspective, it feels unreasonable and unequal that in addition to striving to get along economically and settle in a new host country, one would need to send remittances “back home”. These are exactly the global inequalities Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas with their documentary movies want to illustrate.

The white gaze

This is not the first documentary movie made by Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas. Previously, the couple has been internationally recognized and awarded for their documentary movie Colombia in My Arms. In a documentary series about creative couples at the streaming site Yle Areena, we can follow their journey highlighting global inequalities and unfolding colonial legacies.

In recent years, the lens has also turned towards themselves, raising a discussion about representation and them as white from the Global North making movies about the Global South. We hear them pondering about whether it actually matters if they are white, making a movie in Africa or if it is more important to highlight inequalities than to critically scrutinize them being Europeans and racially white.  

I would suggest that both matters, and that it definitively matters if you are racially white when making movies about colonial legacies. It matters what information, what spaces, what standpoints and what resources you might access. Likewise, it matters that I have a white gaze when writing this review, it positions me differently than if it had been written by an African decent researcher. Scrutinizing the structurally powerful position one has supports self-reflection related to individual encounters, but also power encounters between the Global South and North societies.

Scrutinizing the structurally powerful position one has supports self-reflection related to individual encounters, but also power encounters between the Global South and North societies.

The film demonstrates considerable sensitivity, and Kivistö and Rastas’ personal experiences of living and spending significant time in the Global South inform their understanding of global inequalities. However, recognizing how being white matters would allow the viewers to feel – for coming movies- that this is an ethically sound movie, where white privileges are made conscious – and perhaps contested.

Towards the end, I want to thank both Sibiry and the documentary makers for this important movie, highlighting intersections of transnational life. Openly sharing personal relations, joys and disappointments for a large public requires strength and courage, thank you for this Sibiry. I really wish this documentary movie would be viewed by politicians, researchers and students and I wish Sibiry, that you will be able to dance, freely.

Liselott Sundbäck is a postdoctoral researcher in social policy at Åbo Akademi University.

Silent Legacy (Directors: Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas, 2025) is screened at DocPoint-festival 3.–8.2.2026.
Check the screening programme for showtimes.

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Article image: Silent Legacy (2025) / DocPoint

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Ever since post-truth was declared the word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary in 2016, it has become a highly topical issue in the public debate. The decline of trust in expert knowledge and mainstream media, the rise of authoritarian populist movements and figures, and the growth of alternative media do not appear to be marginal phenomena; they rather seem to point to the reconfiguration of the public sphere of contemporary democracies.

While the misuses of truth in politics are nothing new, recent events have prompted researchers to examine the current crisis of truth and reason in western democracies with a newfound sense of urgency.

Understanding the factors leading to this condition cannot exclude a philosophical understanding of the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment. This article will demonstrate that differing responses to this issue underscore contrasting interpretations of the Enlightenment’s legacy.

The Enlightenment Project

According to the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the Enlightenment is not merely a historical epoch, but rather an intellectual “project”, which he designates as “unfinished” due to the persisting issues it endeavours to address, acknowledging the futility of obstructing or reversing its processes.

At the core of the European “project of modernity” lies the question of reason and the commitment to the pursuit of truth in the face of political dogmatism and obscurantism. Against this background, Habermas challenges anti-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment solutions.

While the former advocates a return to a pre-modern form of thought – thus leading to reactionary and obscurantist forms of politics – the latter argues for the need to overcome the notion of modern reason through a process of relativizing the values of the Enlightenment. Habermas contends that the proposed alternatives are worse than the ongoing, yet to be fully realized, project of modernity itself.

In particular, Habermas takes issue against that European tradition of thought born out of Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticism of metanarratives, arguing that this philosophical tradition leads to a post-Enlightenment, or postmodern, form of relativism. In his analysis of European modernity, Habermas argues that, from Hegel to Nietzsche, the aim of modern reason was “enlightening the Enlightenment about its narrow-mindedness”.

Intellectuals and public figures have been frequently involved in disputes over the threat or promise of European postmodern thought for society.

However, Nietzsche marked the rupture of this tradition because he renounced a revision of the concept of modern reason and bid farewell to the Enlightenment project. According to Habermas, philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, among others followed Nietzsche in his search for an “escape route from modernity”.

At this point, one may wonder whether so-called European postmodern thought has contributed to create the cultural environment conductive to the flourishing of deceptive beliefs fabricated by contemporary sophists. In other words, if the criticism of modern reason fostered by post-Nietzschean thought creates a fertile ground for post-truth.

Intellectuals and public figures have been frequently involved in disputes over the threat or promise of European postmodern thought for society. Advocates and opponents have often presented the opposite perspective in a polemic manner: while critics have frequently conceived European postmodern thought as closely linked to intellectual posturing and impostures, postmodern thinkers have accused their critics of dogmatism and authoritarianism.

Reason and its Monsters

This tension has created institutional barriers and mutual distrust, making it very difficult to build a dialogue on this issue. Despite the disagreement, both sides seem to agree about the existence of an unambiguous conceptual demarcation between modernity and postmodernity. But is it possible to draw a clear line between the modern project and its postmodern dismantlement? To resolve this query, I suggest turn to a renowned aquatint created by the Spanish artist and engraver Francisco Goya.

Created between 1797 and 1799 for the Diario de Madrid, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” depicts a man, who is presumably the artist himself, sleeping at his desk while owls and bats swirl around his head. In the background, ghostly apparitions and strange creatures emerge from the darkness.

The image is often interpreted as a warning against the dangers of ignorance and the consequences of not using reason and rational thought. It suggests that when reason is absent or asleep, the imagination can run wild and give rise to irrational fears and superstitions. Goya’s use of owls and bats, which were commonly associated with witchcraft and the occult, reinforces this theme.

The Enlightenment project can be viewed as the very tension between the ‘dream’ and ‘sleep’ of reason, with both perspectives coexisting in the same image, rather than representing distinct conceptual and chronological instances.

Undoubtedly, the print by Goya has consistently served as a source of inspiration for the prevailing perception of modern reason. However, the caption accompanying the artwork, “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos,” can be subject to multiple interpretations.

In recent years, scholars have pointed out that the titular inscription of Goya can be read as “The dream of reason produces monsters,” a translation that is equally viable as the Spanish term ‘sueño’ can signify either sleep or dream. Understood that way, the monsters are the dreams produced by the looming spectre of reason itself.

The print by Goya presents multiple and potentially conflicting interpretations, and its inherent ambivalence can also offer new insights into the question of the Enlightenment. While the received view portrays modern and postmodern thought as diametrically opposed, Goya’s image suggests an alternative path. The Enlightenment project can be viewed as the very tension between the ‘dream’ and ‘sleep’ of reason, with both perspectives coexisting in the same image, rather than representing distinct conceptual and chronological instances.

From this perspective, dogmatism is not only the result of the “sleep of reason” but also the product of the “dream of reason”, namely the product of a concept of reason that does not acknowledges its limits.

The Incompleteness of European Modernity

The project of modernity cannot thus be reduced to one of the two perspectives but emerges from the productive tension between the two. As previously mentioned, Habermas characterizes the modernity project as “unfinished,” because the challenges it intends to tackle have not yet been resolved.

Nevertheless, resorting to Goya’s image as a heuristic for thinking about modernity, it is possible to interpret Habermas’ “unfinished project” differently. This alternative reading implies that the distinctiveness of the project of modernity lies in its incompleteness.

The alternative concept of the unfinished project of modernity may also offer some valuable insights into how we can approach the issue of post-truth. This interpretation of the project suggests that we should not only be wary about the sleep of reason, namely truth denialism and post-truth cynicism, but also be mindful of how we understand and counteract it, starting from the consideration that there has probably never been a politics of truth, namely an uncontested dream of reason, that we have left behind.

Dr. Marco Piasentier works at the University of Helsinki as a University Researcher in the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives and team leader of the subproject Discovering the Limits of Reason – Europe and the Crisis of Universalism.

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The late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said has argued in his book Culture and Imperialism  “Just as none of us is beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”

Said’s work looks at the relation between imperial conquest, narratives and ideas justifying such relations of struggle over territories – imagined and material. The struggle about ideas, images of Europe’s Others continue to be relevant today, when it comes to which wars, occupations and genocides come to matter in relation to refugee narratives and policy in the European Union.

This struggle is essential to how Europe is constantly produced as a location based on who it is not.  The dominant narratives part of this struggle often erase historical experiences of peoples dispossessed from wars in a broad sense, which has profoundly normative implications to justify violence and selectively exclusionary policies.

As Said argues, while there has been so much written and shown of the Palestinians, the narrative of their current actuality stemming from the stories of their existence in and from displacement from Palestine, later Israel, that narrative is absent. Narratives for Said are formed in various everyday forms like folk tales, novels, but also to the academic books and debates, and more importantly to laws, and legitimacy from political tools and authority.

In this article I introduce four dominant narratives in public discourse, that shape everyday encounters, including research encounters, and academic knowledge production on and about refugees. These narratives illustrate the negotiation that fixes Europe – or a European identity – in relation to its perceived Others, the “not us”.

These narratives are violent, because they are not built on historical experiences of the peoples experiencing displacement across geographies and across times. They maintain structural violence and social inequalities. They need to be dismantled.

In the following, I will outline the four narratives of the grateful refugee, the victim refugee, the successful refugee, and the transparent refugee.

The grateful refugee

The flags of Ukraine fly on top of many public buildings across European Union, and we see the selective embrace of Ukrainians. This embrace, however, might also have an expiry date, but also creates what Mirjam Wajsberg calls circulation of fatigue related to conditions of the wider field of migration control.

There is inevitably compassion fatigue by organisations supporting people fleeing wars, racial battle fatigue for those identified as not deserving of citizenship, research fatigue for researchers endlessly writing about violent conditions of exclusion without witnessing any structural transformation in conditions of people not granted asylum. We witness the unequal mobilisations towards specific bodies from Ukraine by public institutions, civil society, and initiatives alongside the denial of other wars, occupations and genocides across the world.

Nevertheless, the social expectations of gratefulness for receiving refugees and migrants is always present. This is apparent in everyday interactions as in public discourse. The grateful refugee is also “worthy” of our protection, which is not extended equally despite their universal claims.

The social expectations of gratefulness for receiving refugees and migrants is always present.

I have argued with colleagues in a previous research article, that the narrative of the grateful refugee fits into a wider European script of migrant integration in place. In 2015, we witnessed people living in camps across EU showing various expressions of gratitude toward their “hosts”.

Part of the power asymmetries embedded in these expressions of gratitude are problematic, as they force people to present gratitude – breaches of gratitude would sever ties with local populations and the bureaucratic system, making everyday life much harder. And as researchers Paola Bachetta, Fatima El-Tayeb and Jin Haritaworn point out, the longer one lives in Europe, the stronger this paradox of being grateful as an eternal migrant. The locals’ “need to help” can become contingent on the societal expectation of a grateful refugee.

This power dynamic centres on the helper: the humanitarian aid worker, the national citizen volunteer, the public institutions of the welcoming nation state, who become visible for their help. The helper is visible in such humanitarian and volunteer work and shadows the daily labour of migrant workers and precarious citizens. Such invisible care work of receiving and sharing lives fleeing wars continue silently, often precariously within camps, asylum centres, detention centres and between marginalised groups not yet citizens.

As the Martinican psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon underlined, “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.” From coffee to spices, and from cotton to the silks and exotic discoveries literally extracted by and from slave labour, coolies, soldiers during World War I and II, and now “migrant labour”, Europe continues to be built by its Others.

And yet, gratitude remains a dominant relation demanded from the very lands and labours feeding Europe. The famous slogan “We are here because you were there” refuses gratitude precisely based on this historical relation. It becomes important to attend to the colonial amnesia, and invisibility of the hands helping Europe, historically and till today, that is hidden in the name of gratitude demanded from refugees.

The Victim Refugee

Related to the narrative of grateful refugee is the victim refugee that is manufactured in all aspects of humanitarian border regimes. This is internalised through the images and representations of the “victim refugee”, that is long embedded in missionary work and colonial tropes of the subaltern Other. 

Anthropologist Liisa Malkki’s book The Need to Help (2015) talks about Finnish Red Cross volunteers remaining in Finland, but participating in humanitarian support towards people in Africa as fundamentally driven by the “need to help,” which emerges from isolation and from the very domestically rooted identities of such volunteers.

Such a need to help is intimately intertwined with geographical imaginaries of distance and proximity, that continue to produce Others who are defined as being in need of Europe’s help. The victim narrative focuses on the images of people not as agents, but victims to their circumstances. As the anthropologist Shahram Khosravi mentions in his auto-ethnography of an illegal traveller, that he was abnormalized and not seen as a ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ individual, but rather treated like a child, as soon as he became the ‘client’ of refugee support upon entering the camp.

To receive the power and agency of lives navigating war and conditions of exile requires a radical transformation of such structural conditions and institutions. Poet-scholar Saba Hamzah brings attention to waves from the condition of being stranded. She calls for attending to the dynamic of moving despite the direction or strength of the waves, waves being the harsh conditions not only of warzones but also structural conditions of discrimination that follow.

The victim narrative focuses on the images of people not as agents, but victims to their circumstances.

Hamzah offers a vision of being stranded, that rejects any associations of being stuck, but a movement despite the power of the direction, and strength of the waves one is navigating. The victim narrative has always been, and continues to be, challenged in knowledge production and in everyday encounters within asylum systems.

The right to rewrite histories becomes all the more urgent to the question of who is writing whose stories, what stories fit the dominant narratives, why and how, when we think of the migration academic industrial complex. Huge grants and funding machineries feed this complex without questioning the intimate relations sustaining unequal practices of knowledge production in academia.

Universities continue to send students and researchers to do fieldwork and collect stories about refugees, but the ethical questions remain unaddressed in terms of the practices of theory building reproducing inequalities. How are stories collected? Who claims which stories to build what theories? How do these theories or concepts transform not only the lives of those being studied, but also to keep dominant narratives in place feeding inequalities? What about people having the right to rewrite histories based on historical and lived experiences from conditions of exile?

Often questions of ethics are turned into consent forms and bureaucratic procedures giving more administrative work, but also privilege to the researcher to use it to one’s own advantage than to the researched. These are urgent questions to name the violence of the structural hierarchies embedded not only in asylum systems, but also in universities in order to develop tools to dismantle such modes of representation.

The successful refugee

The narrative of the successful refugee is connected to the politics of time. On one hand, asylum regimes steal time from applicants by keeping them endlessly waiting, as Khosravi has pointed out. On the other hand, there is a push towards fast-tracking people to integrate quickly into receiving societies.

The refugee who learns the language, finds a job limited to what the asylum system determined suitable for them – often disconnected from one’s professional and educational qualifications – is “rewarded” to have the traits of a successful, model refugee. The successful refugee adapts.

Again, the person becomes less of a person, but more of a label, or even a stereotype. They become a homogenizing goal, and a success story to report that the system works!

The question remains whose bodies are feeding whose minds to produce knowledge on Europe’s stories and histories today and theories of displacement.

Universities continue to steal time from people waiting for their legal permits in using them for research very often in the form of extracting stories. Students and researchers continuously depend on “refugee stories” to legitimise their theories.

The question remains, how telling one’s story of flight to a researcher, or journalist, or artist keeps in place or transforms structural conditions of racism one faces in daily life, such as access to education, language, jobs based on one’s qualifications and interests and so on. As academics continue to fast track their careers based on publications about refugees and Europe’s violent border regimes, the time and therefore the lives of people continue to be stolen, or put in one arm’s length for such knowledges to be produced.

While the recent welcoming of certain Ukrainian refugees into research positions and education programs showed us the possibilities to open classrooms and research positions to people fleeing wars, it also showed us how little political will existed to open up the university to the lives and people fleeing other warzone areas. The question remains whose bodies are feeding whose minds to produce knowledge on Europe’s stories and histories today, and theories of displacement. Opening up universities with critical learners and scholars, whose experiences of migration, exile and displacement are as rich as the criticality of their thinking, becomes urgent to begin to break this separation.

The transparent refugee

In her book Toward a Global Idea of Race, philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva traces how philosophical and scientific discourses have simultaneously described and instituted the modern subject as “transparent I” – Man, the subject of post-enlightenment European thought. The rational being who is self-determined and different to bodies produced as non-European.

Modern citizens enjoying freedom, security and justice are most importantly, through this lens, those enacting a ‘transparent I’. However, in the process of becoming citizens, transparency is demanded. A refugee has no right to opacity, of not being made fully visible in the process. Asylum-seekers in or arriving to the EU have to produce a “transparent I” in terms of owning their story of flight, and producing it as one shaped by individual self-determination. And, even when they do, they may not be believed, producing them as affectable to the exclusionary policies.

In the process of becoming citizens, transparency is demanded. A refugee has no right to opacity, of not being made fully visible, in the process.

A refugee according to the 1951 Refugee Convention of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – is someone fleeing her or his country, because of individual persecution rather than widespread violence. Transparency is used as a narrative of security measure against supposedly fraudulent applicants, while the decisions for rejection or acceptance of the asylum application itself is an opaque bureaucratic process with convoluted loops of tenuous accountability.

On the other hand, transparency also shapes everyday acts of citizenship, where one is continuously asked – interrogated – about their reasons for fleeing. The business of anthropology  or social sciences at large on displacement, also reinforces the European border regime by making border-crossers into objects of study, by demanding transparency.

The narratives of transparency are reproduced not only by state-actors but also in acts of (citizen) hospitality and academic practices towards people seeking life within restricted legal pathways. Investigation and scrutiny, bureaucratic or academic, are the norm. The transparent refugee is an object to the point of being or becoming absent.

Call for questioning Europe’s refugee narratives

Coming back to Said’s call mentioned in the beginning, we need to see these above narratives as struggles over ideas, forms, images, that continue to legitimise violence inside and outside EU. Most importantly, it is a call for constantly questioning the narratives and the very terms and vocabularies in which we discuss such topics of migration, borders, displacement, that hide relations of extraction, dispossession, silencing central to the making of Europe.

And most importantly, one has to question who is allowed to narrate whose story, on whose terms, why and at the cost of whose knowledges being erased. This is the constant power struggle Said talks about, as much in academia as in other spaces.

Kolar Aparna is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts, Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and European Narratives. In the last decade, she has been teaching on themes related to postcolonial Europe. Her work is focused on building situated knowledges as part of epistemic struggles around citizenship, movement, and borders.

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In this video essay Apply generously Illusia Juvani examines the phenomenon of decaying funding of arts through their own experience: how insecurity affects artist’s work and life. The question of grant funding and economic insecurity touches also other groups such as researchers and civil society.

Illusia Juvani is an award-winning artist-activist who studies difficult and painful societal issues in their video, photography, sound, object and text works.

This work is on display in Art from Politics Series 27.11.2023–28.1.2024.

My well-being is always just temporary. A brief moment in between hopelessness. Art is such a heavily underfunded field, therefore when I manage to score a grant occasionally I am so relieved. The two year working grant I received from Kone Foundation has given me so much security. I have been able to live with my traumas. I’ve been feeling so much better because of it. It has been that much easier to live when an occasional taxi drive to emergency care clinic doesn’t fuck up your budget by driving your personal economy into a long term deficit.

I’ve had enough money to go swimming regularly. Eat out sometimes. I’ve been able to buy a trampoline that can stand my weight. I’ve bought a dishwasher. I’ve had enough money to afford dental care. I’ve been able to buy well balanced food that has helped me to have enough energy to work and live. I have paid off some of my student loan, I’ve gotten a small loan to buy a really good bed that doesn’t destroy my back. I invested in a bicycle. I have been able to rent a bigger apartment where there’s actually enough space to move around and to create. I’ve danced more than ever.

I have been able to start new hobbies, like planting a small garden on my balcony. The first summer was completely fruitless, but I didn’t mind. I have zero regrets about the money I’ve spent on plants, seeds and soil. It has been Totally worth it. Unnecessary? Yes, for sure, but has it given me so much happiness? Absolutely.

Having enough resources has made it possible to buy so many different “non-essential” purchases that have made the quality of my life so much better. When you have enough money, not even your mistakes are so devastating. It helps to see the future and picture you in it. It has enabled all my potential to flourish and grow. It has not been drained by the constant worry that is living in poverty. The oasis I have created for me and my cats is a testament to that.

I am not ashamed of my poverty anymore. I have had enough peace of mind and time to ponder thoroughly what it actually means in this current capitalistic system. I understand now that none of it is my fault. The fault lies in the power structure that has been designed to do so. It is a power structure where my well-being is not seen as valuable.

What cruel people don’t understand is that poverty hurts. It is violent and isolating. It drives you into desperation and desperation doesn’t make anyone a better person or a better worker for that matter. It doesn’t encourage you to participate in anything. It destroys your self-esteem. If your voice seems worthless you are more likely not going to use it. How can anyone assume that you can make the best choices for your life when you only have the means to barely survive.

The lack of prospects describes the situation accurately. Does that sound like a position that makes you feel safe, secure or well? When you add on any other challenges you might have on top of that, the odds are even less in your favour. Your capacity goes into energy saving mode and all your aspirations fade away. Fear takes up more space and you can’t afford to hope, dream or trust.

The work is supported by Kone Foundation.

Article image: Illusia Juvani : Apply Generously (2023)

Julkaisu Art From Politics: Illusia Juvani: Apply generously (2023) ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.