elsɘ collective

Our next event ”Machines” will take place in Kunsthalle Kohta on saturday 28.6! The third edition of the mini-festival Machines brings together a series of audiovisual performances that explore the tense interplay between machine and organism, control and liberation, order and chaos. This year’s program anchors itself in a provocative question: How can we interrupt systemic codes: mechanical labor, exploited bodies, and programmed behaviors, as acts of resistance and emancipation? Through malfunction, re-sampling, and remixing, the participating artists reprogram for disobedience, creating space for unruly, uncontrolled machines. Program 17:00 – Opening speech 17:10 – Alsa Ojala | Live music 17:40 – Hermanni Härmälä & Pyry Rämö | Performance 18:10 – Phan Nguyen & Trang Chung | Performance 19:00 – Enbo | Live music 19:40 – Soko Hwang | AV performance 20:20 – Abaris Moerae, Laura MRLS & Röd Mjölk | AV live performance 21:00 – Dmytro Bondariev | DJ set 21:40 – Iida Valmé | Performance 22:00 – Esa Kaari | Live & DJ set 22:40 – Henia Nikkilä | Performance 23:20 – End Light technician: Mikko Kaukonen Sound Technician: Ilja Pippa Poster: Aala Nyman Else includes Soko Hwang, Laura Bestle Morales, Trang Chung, Aala Nyman, and Phan Nguyen.

Thank you everyone who joined us last saturday! 🩶🛞

28.06. | 20:20 – Abaris Moerae, Laura MRLS & Röd Mjölk | AV live performance @kohtataidehalli For Machines, sound artists Abaris Moerae and Laura MRLS join visual artist VJ RÖD MJÖLK to present an inverted live AV performance where sound follows image. Breaking from the conventional VJ/live set dynamic, the artists generate an improvised soundscape in response to evolving visual stimuli. The result is an emotionally charged, abrasive experience that explores the tension between human instinct and mechanized rhythm. Reflecting on machines as both instruments of liberation and systems of control, the performance mirrors the chaos, violence, and fragility embedded in technological progress. This sensory confrontation invites the audience to question who — or what — is truly in control. @abaris_moerae @la.mrls @rod.mjolk

Henia Nikkilä: Why don’t you just own it? A performance with sticks and cymbals. Henia Nikkilä is a musical artist, sound designer, and a performance artist working with music and contemporary theatre. She is interested in blurring the lines between, in and around genres and mediums of performing. The weirdness of the times we are living in is a constant inspiration for her. Henia’s moniker Murrettumeri has performed in Helsinki Music Week and Norberg Festival etc, and together with Saana Pohjonen their new theater piece JUMALA=RAKKAUS will premiere in Kiasma-teatteri in 2026. Saturday 28. June at 22:40 Kunsthalle Kohta

Live in helsinki: Esa Kaari playing tracks made with the computer at his friend’s studio. videos from around. sundays in a room with no windows. /guest_visitor Saturday 28. June at 22:00 Kunsthalle Kohta

​​Iida Valmé (all pronouns) is a Finnish-Haitian-American queer multidisciplinary artist with an international practice currently based in Helsinki. Love is at the center of their practice. Valmé’s existence and expression is a direct homage to their ancestors, a declaration of love to those whose ancestor they will one day be. Their work and creative process draw power from their community, nature, intuition, and the spiritual realm. Saturday 28. June at 21:40 Kunsthalle Kohta

Dmytro Bondariev | DJ set i always get excited when production means quit being anonymous and start alternating, distorting and corrupting outcomes. virtually unavoidable in process of diy production, equipment resist to be fully obedient and render itself as independent agency. in current state of slow cancellation of future lo-fi turned into just another tag/stylistic element. it’s being appropriated by mainstream, utilized, weaponized and imitated in different ways. Tables overthrown, signals tamed, agencies reduced to bare and controlled minimum, it’s allowed to have voice but not to interrupt .is lo-fi still radically liberating? my set aims to answer this question, grey areas and exceptions inside it. genre tags: experimental, musique concrete, trap. Saturday 28. June at 21:00 Kunsthalle Kohta

RÖD MJÖLK is the brainchild of Jassir Kuronen, a Finnish designer, visual artist, and VJ. Oscillating between various technological practices, he primarily focuses on reimagining familiar concepts from both popular and underground culture through deconstruction, distortion, and contrast, seeking new perspectives from which to view these collective ideas. Emerging from Helsinki’s underground club scene with his signature aesthetic, he has become one of the most recognizable figures in local VJ culture. His work and performances have been featured at numerous museums and festivals across Europe, including DEMO in the Netherlands and Baltic Circle in Finland. Saturday 28. June at 20:20 – Abaris Moerae, Laura MRLS & Röd Mjölk | AV live performance Kunsthalle Kohta

Laura MRLS is a non-binary DJ, producer, and curator based in Helsinki. Known for their hypnotic techno selections layered with eerie, cinemascopic atmospheres and industrialesque intensity, Laura weaves sets that are both emotionally charged and sonically intricate. A resident of SUBVERTED and Monument, co-founder of the else collective, and host of the monthly Affine Dark Science [AFDS] show on IDA Radio Helsinki, they’ve recently expanded AFDS into a record label—kicking off with its first ambient-focused event at Kaiku in Helsinki. Their debut live sets at Solstice Festival 2024 and at Helsinki Night of the Arts unveiled a deeper, cinematic ambient and drone direction. In early 2025, Laura made their US debut with a DJ set at the underground event series Shelter in Los Angeles and a radio appearance on YERBA Radio in San Francisco. April 2025 also marked their first official release: an ambient track on a VA compilation by the Greek label USM Recordings. With performances across Europe at venues like TRESOR Berlin, ://about blank, Hall, The Garage of the Bass Valley, and Post Bar, Laura continues to shape a distinct sonic language—merging tension, texture, and emotional depth into a constantly evolving sound narrative. Saturday 28. June at 20:20 – Abaris Moerae, Laura MRLS & Röd Mjölk | AV live performance Kunsthalle Kohta

ABARIS MOERAE Nicholas Pucciarelli, known as Abaris Moerae, is a distinguished multi-instrumentalist, composer, and avant-garde musician. He co-founded and curates the record label New Polar Sound, celebrated for its cutting-edge contributions to experimental music. Abaris Moerae’s artistic journey spans across various eclectic projects, including Mortar Devotions and Vitriol Crops. He is also a key figure in Nona et Decima, a collaboration that brought him together with acclaimed American director, screenwriter, producer, and composer Edward Paul Quist—also known as Embryoroom—widely recognized for his work with the legendary Pan Sonic. Under the pseudonym Abaris Moerae he lays the intent of filtering the matter of being for a complete transmutation of self to music. Saturday 28. June at 20:20 – Abaris Moerae, Laura MRLS & Röd Mjölk | AV live performance Kunsthalle Kohta

Sampo 3000: Dig Deep Inside the Soul Reimagining the myth of Sampo—the magical machine from the Finnish national epic Kalevala—Sampo 3000 transforms this tale into a techno-mythological allegory of ecological collapse. The performance excavates the entangled layers of greed, contested ownership, and the global race for mineral extraction, with a particular focus on the mining industry, metal wars, and the resource demands driven by the electric vehicle boom. Through a haunting fusion of mythology, technology, and capitalism, Sampo 3000 explores the deep mechanics of extractivism and environmental devastation, exposing their entwinement with both local struggles and global capitalist power structures. The work sparks critical reflection on the planetary future we are manufacturing—one forged in metal, myth, and gold. Soko Hwang appears as a drifting ghost in time and space, navigating the fault lines of memory, resistance, and spectral presence. The artwork is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Taike and Kone Foundation. Saturday 28. June at 19:40 Kunsthalle Kohta

Enbo is a voyager, wandering through the dialogue between natural and synthetic breath and silence — seeing each moment as a note in the oldest rite of contemporary life, echoing through the living and the dead. ’Origins of Beings’ is a meditative chanting duet between human and machine, exchanging koans across blurred boundaries. Together, in stillness and motion, they contemplate the boundless emptiness—at the heart of awakened presence. Saturday 28. June at 19:00 Kunsthalle Kohta