A Conversation with New Fam
New Fam is a performance art collective founded by artists Teo Ala-Ruona and Anni Puolakka. Invited to Lou for a residency in June, the duo performs their new piece Suckers on August 9th. We sat down with them to talk about their upcoming performance, collaboration, and time at Lou.
Tell us about New Fam. What is it and when did it all start?
New Fam is a performance collective we founded in 2022 while working on a performance called Babymmalian. We had collaborated in various constellations before, and when Teo was invited to perform at Vapaan taiteen tila that year, we felt a desire to do something together. We then realised that we could create a duo collective that would continue after that as well.
Working together immediately felt equal, mutually inspiring, highly generative, and deeply satisfying. The other projects we work on tend to be quite production-heavy, whereas New Fam is more intuitive and lighter. It’s more rooted in the tradition of smaller-scale performance art.
One of our core questions was how to approach collectivity in art-making. We both love making art and connecting through making art; we live our lives through it. In 2022, Anni had a baby and still wanted to make art, but many things had shifted. There was a need to find new ways of working. In this collaboration, that felt possible. It felt organic to draw from that life situation.
You both have active individual and collaborative artistic practices outside of New Fam. Which parts of your individual practices feed into this collaboration?
T: One core value for me in making art is social well-being with the people I work with. New Fam feels central as a way to reproduce meaningful life and art.
The teenager, the baby and the infant have been recurring characters in my works. And particularly the questions on how gendering and categorization begin right after birth, and how these shape people and subjectivities. The baby is a revolutionary site of thought for me and it's wonderful to be able to wallow in the baby-like characters in the works of New Fam.
Questions around how images of sexuality are produced have also been present in both of our practices. Choreographically, we often recycle material, drawing from earlier works like Parachorale and Babymmalian, as well as from our solo practices—such as singing, and the recurring image of the cow and lactation in Anni’s work.
A: Spontaneity and trust are central elements for me. While the word experimentation might sound like a cliché, we’ve managed – in collaboration with organisations like Lou – to create working conditions that are relatively pressure-free and playful. There’s a mix of humor and seriousness in both of our approaches, and the tension and connection between them is always present in what we do.
In terms of feeding from previous work—milk, nursing and sucking have been important themes and practices in my work for almost 10 years—it’s really fun that we have brought sucking into this performance as well.
Are there some aspects that become possible only through New Fam?
A: It’s very spontaneous, very fast. Sometimes I find it hard to trust spontaneous ideas when choosing what to follow—but here, I do trust them.
T: Babymmalian and working with Anni has influenced my other works as well. Even in more production-heavy contexts, I try to hold onto that sense of trust, and trusting experimentality. Even when the pressure is high, trust is the only way to create meaningful artworks.
Anni said the other day, there are different phases in one’s artistic career, and in the process of making art. It’s not about trying to make a masterpiece every time. Sustaining the practice—and each other’s practice—is the masterpiece. Individual artworks may not always be so interesting or finalised, and that’s okay. It’s a lovely guiding principle, if it can be maintained.
New Fam’s previous performance was a feeding session—Babymmalian—exploring breastfeeding taboos through fluid bonding, kink, and human-animal hybridity. How does the new performance, Suckers, continue or shift these themes?
A: Through Babymmalian, and through my previous works, I’ve wanted to explore what suckling can mean beyond the historically and politically constructed norm of a mother breastfeeding her child. Or the norm of humans suckling on cows, indirectly. I and we have been drawing from historical paintings showing scenes of adult nursing. Those scenes carry different symbolic, spiritual and political layers. In Suckers we are sucking digits and I think it’s exciting to experience, with the audience, what that can mean. We propose it as one meaningful form of bonding.
T: And it’s also perceived as erotic—foot fetishes are a major kink for some people. In our works, the imagery of eroticism, care, and various power positions varies. Both Babymmalian and Suckers include the dynamic of parent and offspring, with roles that shift and blur, constantly undulating between who is who. We’ve carried elements over from Babymmalian, where two characters are on a journey from one place to another. They appear, visit a place, they have a feeding session and leave. That same logic continues in Suckers. The idea is that New Fam is a traveling entity.
For the upcoming performance, you’ve brought a custom-made bed frame into the gallery space, designed and made by scenographer Teo Paaer. Why did you choose a bed as the central platform or stage for the piece?
A: The bed is an important element of home and life. A place to focus on desires, needs, dreams, fears. It’s also a place to feel intensely alone or lonely, or connected. We also want to honor the history of beds in contemporary art and bring those references into our work. We aimed to evoke connotations and histories tied to bed art, like works by Tracey Emin or Sophie Calle. We also thought about Lou, considering how we could play with the idea of the bed as an intimate stage and what kind of relationship with the audience would suit that space.
T: The bed carries so much: the nuclear family, the heteronormative way of reproduction– sharing a bed with one partner, as the size of the bed is usually meant for two people of a specific size. The bed is also a site for pornography. An exciting reference is Paul B. Preciado’s writing about Hugh Hefner’s rotating bed in Pornotopia.
A: Also the bed and body fluids are connected; mattresses archive our lives through stains. When nursing, a lot of milk can leak out and soak the sheets. There’s also blood, pee, saliva, sexual fluids and vomit.
T: It felt very clear that we wanted to bring a bed to Lou. We wanted a custom-made bed—a New Fam bed—that we can continue to use in future work. Throughout our residency at Lou, we did everything on this bed—talking, napping, typing. It’s been so nice to work on this mattress. Only after this residency can we fully understand what it did.
The performance takes place at Lou, a small gallery space. There’s certain differences when working in a space like Lou rather than a more traditional performance venue. Are there certain aspects that make this performance particularly interesting to present at Lou?
T: This is my first time performing at Lou, a space with the history of Outo olo and Sorbus, which has been one of the most influential art venues for me since I moved to Helsinki. I love performing in small spaces. The size of the space determined what size stage—the bed—would fit. Even with just five people, there’s a sense of crowdedness and the intimacy that a bed brings.
A: What’s special about this space is that once people enter, they can’t easily leave. Once you’re in, you’re bound to share this closeness with us. I agree—it works conceptually that we’re in it together with the audience. It’s amazing that the space carries a history, and I’ve actually worked here on many projects over the years. There’s a strong sense of familiarity.
T: This space has been building a community in Helsinki, and I feel like I belong here.
The community aspect is something we’re also exploring with New Fam. You can never say enough about how important communities are, even though building and sustaining them feels increasingly difficult. That feels very important to us.
A: This has been an opportunity to engage with questions around family and community—especially the idea of offering alternatives to the nuclear family. Both having children and being childless are surrounded by a vast array of social codes and assumptions.
T: We’ve spent time lying in bed, talking about these issues—how people might feel various kinds of insecurities stemming from social expectations and stereotypical prejudices when children are born. It’s crucial to build bridges between those who have babies and those who don’t. Working at Lou has been opening and hitting a lot of topics that we have been busy with.