Mosaiikkii Urban Culture Center- May 17th, 2025
The fourth edition of the One-Day Stand series takes place on May 17th at 17:00 at the Mosaiikki Urban Culture Center! This special event features performances by participants of Sidewalk: 1st Edition 2024: François Bernier, Alan P. L. Fung, Paula Haapalahti, Milla Hutri, Heidi Lähtevänoja, Miikka Poutiainen, Dmitry Tayya, and Irma Optimisti—who also contributed as one of the guest lecturers of the project.
Appropriately, the event will be held in the same venue where Sidewalk’s workshops usually take place, and it follows directly after one of the workshop sessions of the project’s second edition in 2025.
Sidewalk is a community-driven project that blends collaborative creativity with everyday life, offering a unique platform for video performances. Designed to engage both local residents and wider audiences—regardless of prior artistic experience—Sidewalk fosters meaningful connections through performance art. At its core, the project embraces the idea that everyone has a story to tell, encouraging participants to explore their personal narratives through artistic expression.
Structured as an eight-session workshop, the Sidewalk project guides participants through the fundamentals of performance art, from conceptualization to realization. Through hands-on exploration, they experiment with different approaches, refine their ideas, and develop their performances. The final works are documented, edited, and presented in a public exhibition, showcasing the diverse perspectives and creative voices that emerge from the process.
Poster Design: Parsa Kamehkhosh
One-Day Stand No.4
Irma Optimisti
Irma Optimisti (real name Irma Anita Luhta; née Yliaho, born 1952 in Vaasa ) is a mathematician, performance artist, and curator living in Helsinki. She is one of the early pioneers of Finnish performance art, and her performances have also received international attention. Luhta graduated with a master's degree from the University of Oulu and in 1997 defended her doctoral thesis in chaos theory at the University of Vaasa, with a topic of structural changes in complex systems. From 1984 to 1999, she worked as a researcher and teacher at the University of Vaasa, and from 2001, she was a lecturer in mathematics at the Turku School of Economics. Irma Optimisti's ironic and parodic performances often address feminism, mathematics and chaos.
Artists & Documentation of Their Performances
