Itkijänaiset

ITKIJÄNAISET (engl. The Weeping women) is a piece about urban littering. Four women in mourning weeds wonder around the town in spirit of ritualistic cortege. This liturgic group sings hymns and haunts for misplaced rubbish. When they find one, they gather around it, draw its borders with chalk and place it to a tiny coffin. The rubbish in its tiny coffin is brought to a bin. The group buries the trash with a ceremony and draws for it memorial texts on the bin in which it lays.

The title Itkijänaiset (Weeping women) refers to a carelian tradition of the 17th and 18th hundreds, in which pagan women groups went to cry and sing laminations on yards of houses and communities face by tragedy.