Past Residents Minou Norouzi
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Photo: Veikko Somerpuro
Minou Norouzi is a filmmaker, writer, curator. She obtained her doctorate from Goldsmiths, University of London supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2018) and was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Arts at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies supported by Kone Foundation (2019/20). Her research draws on decolonial feminist scholarship to examine documentaries in an interdisciplinary context. Minou is especially interested in cinematic language and aesthetic productions that communicate the ineffable challenging normative, totalising accounts of history and knowledge production. From 2011 – 2019 Minou was responsible for the creative direction and production of the Arts Council England-funded film programming initiative Sheffield Fringe.
I am in the very early stages of research for a video essay titled “On the Tenderness of Men”. It is a filmic meditation on men and violence explored through the iconic modernist architecture of Temppeliaukio kirkko, the ‘Rock Church’, and its construction during the politically charged period of 1968. I’ll explore the building’s construction history and the biography of its architects to meditate discursively on interlinking themes. These include the Winter War, migration and wartime expulsion, the politics of 1968 and the clash between young architects and established ones. The project explores why some architects found themselves marginalized from the ‘establishment’. Central to my inquiries is to ask if the histories of marginalization in Finnish architecture share common ground with other types of exclusions.