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Riikka Talvitie: When politics turns into an environmental war

April, 12 2025

RIIKKA TALVITIE has been a valued collaborator of the PhD In One Night platform since 2018, when she took part in one of our interdisciplinary courses at Uniarts Helsinki. Since then, she has participated in Guerilla University 2020 and visited us at the Orangeries de Bierbais in 2024.

What follows is an excerpt from her text, written in connection with her oratorio dedicated to the action "Planting 4 Million Trees"—an initiative carried out amidst war and desert conditions in Northern Syria by our comrades in the Kurdish community.

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The following text contains excerpts from the article Composer’s comment: When politics turns into an environmental war, originally publised on June 21st, 2023 at https://musiikinaika.org. The full text can be read here.

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The goal of Green Tress, which operates in the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, is to plant four million trees over five years and significantly increase the area of green spaces. The citizens’ initiative, started by volunteers in October 2020, also works boldly at the border of art and science.

Can a composition take a political stance?

This article is essentially related to my new piece Green Tress, which will be premiered at Time of Music festival in Viitasaari. It is part of the project “21st Century Voices/Voices reimagined” of Time of Music and Huddesfield Contemporary Music Festival.

The project includes six contemporary composers: American Tyshawn Sorey, Ukrainian Anna Korsun, British-Rwandan Auclair, Swiss-Nigerian Charles Uzor, British Mariam Rezaei and me from Finland. Our new works comment on the song cycle Voices composed by the German composer Hans-Werner Henze in the 1970s. Voices consists of 22 political songs. New pieces are co-commissioned by Time of Music and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. They are part of the Sounds Now project funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme, and will be performed by the London Sinfonietta later in Huddersfield and London’s South Bank Centre.

My new piece should take a stand on one of the burning political questions of contemporary society. But is this even possible for a piece of music? How can a composer act politically?

Next, I will tell you about the backgrounds and collaborators of the Green Tress tree planting project, which acts as the starting point of my work. I wanted to focus my politics on global ecological issues. I chose this project because I see similarities in its emancipatory and ecological attitude with such critical art-making practices, which I am extremely interested in. The article is an essential part of the piece Green Tress performed during Time of Music in Viitasaari. Only these two elements together can constitute a political act.

Writing in connection with composing is also a kind of taboo. Among contemporary composers (at least in Finland) we are used to thinking that music should be enough as it is, without explanatory text or other material. I want to defy this view by writing a long and thorough text alongside my composition.

[. . .]The full text can be read here.[. . .]

Guerilla – a laboratory for learning and freedom

I met one of the founding members of Green Tress, the literary researcher Gulistan Sido in October 2020. That was when a collective laboratory named Guerilla University was launched remotely, the idea of which was to bring researchers and artists from different fields together to discuss new kinds of radical and innovative ways of learning.

Sido was working at the University of Rojava at the time, but has since started her postgraduate studies in Paris. She studies representations of cultural identity and otherness in Kurdish oral tradition and literature.

The initiator of Guerilla University is ex-Yugoslav playwright, translator, journalist Ivana Momčilović, who lives in Belgium, and her collective Phd in One Night, which she launched in 2007.

Guerilla University is a platform for common learning about freedom. It is based on moments, coincidences, interruptions, rewrites, failures and rests in the poetic, political and aesthetic possibilities of incompleteness.

“Unlearning and gardening as art are its ideal forms. The garden, as a laboratory, poses the hypothesis of a new reconfiguration of the world, of the possible and the impossible, a new relationship between man and society, as well as the relationship between man and nature”, Momčilović writes.

Green Tress’ partner, University of Rojava, was born in the middle of the war

Green Tress operates in The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, better known by the Kurdish name Rojava.

The Rojava revolution that started in 2012 launched a democratic autonomy project, as a result of which three provinces mainly inhabited by Kurds declared themselves independent from the Syrian government. After the collapse of the state administration in 2014, a new kind of democratic governance system has been created in the region, based on grassroots local participation, gender equality and ecological values.

The region of Rojava is ethnically and religiously very diverse. For the development of democracy in the region, it has been important to bring the local population together and create a system where the different participants could find an understanding for negotiation.

One of the partners of the Green Tress project, Rojava University, was founded in Kamishli in 2016 in the middle of the war. The university is one manifestation of the goals set by the Rojava revolution regarding Kurdish-language education, and it shares the self-governing region’s basic values of ecological life, democratic society, and women’s freedom.

The rest of the world remembers Rojava region for how the armed YPG forces, as close allies of the United States, finally defeated the extremist organization ISIS. The administration of Rojava still bears responsibility for the region’s refugee camps and imprisoned ISIS fighters.

Although the development and clarification of self-government has brought stability to the region’s political structures, the autonomous Kurdish region’s cooperation with Turkey has clearly become more difficult since the outbreak of the peaceful revolution. The environment has also faced serious challenges. Turkey has targeted northern Syria with several military operations, which have had harmful consequences for the environment. In particular, the Turkish-controlled Afrin district has seen massive logging of olive trees since 2018.

[. . .]The full text can be read here.[. . .]

Bierbai’s olive tree continues as a composition in Viitasaari

As a symbolic radical gesture of peace, the delegation of Green Tress planted a (Kurdish) olive tree in Bierbais’ garden in Brussels in May 2022. I will continue this gesture of peace in the form of Green Tress composition performed in Time of Music.

In many contexts, Rojava’s model of a new kind of democratic thinking is described as utopian. For example, Helsingin Sanomat (21.10.2019) states that the area “has sometimes been portrayed in the media as a kind of romantic and feminist revolutionary utopia”.

Because I have some feminism and activism hidden inside me, I believe in that utopia. Planting trees in the middle of all the conflicts is, in my opinion, a clear indication of the positive consequences of the critical thinking behind it. Isn’t a touch of utopia needed in life as well as in art?

I would like to thank Middle East researcher Anu Leinonen for a fruitful discussion on the subject and composer Stephen James Webb for his important help in the composition phase of the piece.

The spokesperson of Green Tress Ziwar Shekho talks about the background and goals of the project.

Writer: Riikka Talvitie, composer, June 21, 2023

Riikka Talvitie’s work Green Tress was premiered in the opening concert of Time of Music. 21st Century Voices I concert at Viitasaari Areena on 4th of July at 7:00 pm.