Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Astrid Joutseno
Home institution
University of Turku
Country of origin (home institution)
Finland
Discipline(s)
Arts and arts studies
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Astrid Joutseno/Swan’s award-winning PhD Life Writing from Birth to Death: How M/others Know (2021) examined maternal life writing online. She started her postdoctoral research in Selma, University of Turku in 2022. As a songwriter Swan has published seven albums internationally. In 2018 she won the prestigious Teosto Award and her music was nominated for the Scandinavian Music Prize. Her latest album D/other came out in 2021. In 2019 Joutseno/Swan published a memoir Viimeinen kirjani: kirjoituksia elämästä (Nemo). Joutseno/Swan is a researcher in the Finnish Academy’s research project Counter Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency.
Research Project
Inheriting Grief: Academic and Artistic Research into Musical Kinship
Astrid Joutseno/Swan is conducting her postdoctoral research about grief. In HCAS she investigates the processual connectivity between making art and researching. Her focus is on the process itself; how knowledge is produced in contamination with making music, writing and researching. Joutseno/Swan approaches grief in relation to two historical lives: pianist Astrid Joutseno from Turku, Finland (1899–1962) and violinist Eliasz Dobrzyniec (1889–?) who came from a Polish Jewish musician family in Warsaw. The two figures are related to the researcher but were long-lost in the family narrative. Microhistories relate to larger sociopolitical and historical contexts and so Joutseno and Dobrzyniec become meaningful in the present. During the contemporary anti-LGBTQIA+ and antisemitic motioning in Europe, this project provides a possibility of addressing generational connectedness across national, ethnic, sexual or gendered definitions. Grief over what is lost may become a unifying affect, while music may provide a bridge across the silences of time.
Research Interests:
Grief as an affect; cultural grief; grief of the dying; artistic research; art and epistemology; life writing