Nordic Countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden) 2025

Title: Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture
Commissioner: Carina Jaatinen, Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, Finland; Yngvill Aagaard Sjöösten, The National Museum of Norway; Karin Nilsson, ArkDes, Sweden
Curator: Kaisa Karvinen
Exhibitors: Teo Ala-Ruona and collaborators (A.L. Hu, Teo Paaer, Tuukka Haapakorpi, Venla Helenius, Kiia Beilinson, Ervin Latimer, Even Minn, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Kid Kokko, Caroline Suinner)

The way we think about bodies manifests in the way we design and build architecture. Architecture influences our bodies, determining how we use spaces and how our bodies perform within the fabric of our built environment. What happens if we take the trans body as a lens through which to examine architecture? Industry Muscle reinterprets the ideals of modern architecture from this particular viewpoint. In the exhibition, the built environment is seen as a stage of sociopolitical norms that are embedded in fossil-based culture. The trans body crowbars its way into this structure and reveals the blueprint within.

Industry Muscle is developed by the artist Teo Ala-Ruona, who works at the intersection between performance art, theatre and choreography and focuses on trans embodiment and ecology. For the exhibition he has assembled a multidisciplinary team of collaborators who bring together architecture, trans theory, ecological theory and performance art.

The exhibition seeks a dialogue with Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Countries Pavilion, a major example of modern architecture. In line with his performative practice, Ala-Ruona introduces five speculative scores, a set of instructions, that serve as critical prompts for future architecture: Impurity, questioning the role of the ideal of purity in modern architecture and the modern way of life; Decategorisation, challenging the categorisation and segregation inherent in our built environment; Performance, investigating how architectural spaces shape everyday performances related to gender and identity; Techno-body, uncovering the potential of architecture to empower bodies to autonomically reshape themselves; Reuse, we must reuse and reorganise the material remains we already have.

In Industry Muscle, dust lingers in empty parking halls. The hum of the body blends with the noise of the factory. The car, a proof of the fossil-based society, stands motionless, turned into a stage. We are all on display. The artist’s bare body is being tattooed with a Modulor Man superimposed on a Vitruvian man – in a search for other forms for future architecture.