With Forests in Our Mouths
Speaking Queer Utopias into Being
(2025)

Format: Constellation artwork
Dates: Jan 2024 - Dec 2025
Venues: Multiple locations and online
Chapter Seven: 11-27 Apr 2025, Lou gallery, Helsinki (FI); 25 Apr 2025, Esiintymä Festival, Outokumpu (FI)
Chapter Eight: Book release, Jul 2025
Chapter Nine: 24-25 Sep 2025, Ballhaus Ost, Berlin (DE)
Chapter Ten: 02-14 Nov 2025, Loisti gallery, Helsinki (FI); Forest walk, Outokumpu (FI); Digital release, True Aether
Chapter Eleven: 28-30 Nov 2025, Titanik gallery, XS-Festival, Turku (FI)
Chapter Twelve: Publication, Dec 2025
Language: English, Damiá, Finnish
Project website: withforestsinourmouths.com
Article: A Constellation Artwork

Artistic direction, text, performance, design: Chris Gylee & Aslan

Working together as the Queer multidisciplinary performance collective ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, we will create and present the project With Forests in Our Mouths: Speaking Queer Utopias into Being. We will bring together live performance, filmworks, sound installation and publication to explore multiple visions of Queer utopias. We will use Queer biography, speculative fiction, and auto-ethnography as the raw material for this two-year project.

With Forests in Our Mouths is a ‘constellation artwork’ and each chapter offers an entry into the artistic enquiry of the overall work. It can be accessed in various times and places and in various different combinations. Audiences are given space to overlay their own interpretations and to make their own connections.

The stories we will tell are Queer myths brought back from a place that exists outside of time and place — a forested planet, ghosts from utopias of the past, journeys through time and space, sex and starships, strange grammar. We ask: What if Queer people had brand new words to speak with? What if we had a place that we could truly call home?

The project is an urgent attempt to imagine kinder, more accessible, and more sustainable futures where Queer bodies can thrive; it is an artistic attempt to answer the question: Where do we go from here?; and it represents a radical reimagining of our working practices, freed from the limitations and demands of the boom-bust cycle of short-term funding models.

For With Forests in Our Mouths we will be based in our rural home and studio in Outokumpu, North Karelia, with research trips, residencies, and public sharings taking place in locations locally, across Finland, and international

“Actually, we do have karaoke but you mustn’t breathe a word about it to anyone. Ever.”

If there is to be singing in Utopia, we have to make room for false notes, too! We can’t imagine getting to the new world and all of us being perfectly in tune. Utopia can’t be an excuse for musical fascism. It’s a place for wild singing under the moon. And the moon doesn’t care what you sound like. We lost all the old lyrics but we made up better ones — in the new language, using brand new words, singing about things we actually care about. We wear special costumes we made from old cloth, stitching magic into the threads since the Dark Days ended. Karaoke is our revolution and finally it’s Commons.

Echo Ballads // Pasián Esba is a live performance and exhibition by Queer collective ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, and represents the Seventh Chapter of the constellation artwork With Forests in Our Mouths (2024/25).

“Departure.
The journey has begun.
There is no turning back — it’s far too late for that.
They told us it will take forty days and forty nights.
To cross The Deep.
I came with nothing.”

The Deep is a novella in eight-hundred lines recounting a voyage of forty days and forty nights from the point of view of two narrators in sections of ten lines per narrator per twenty-four hour period. It was written collaboratively over forty consecutive days in the winter of 2024 as the nights lengthened towards the solstice in the wetland landscape of southwest Finland. What used to be islands now rise as wooded hillocks from flat fields and the shadows of geese move against the sky.

The Deep is the eighth chapter of the constellation artwork With Forests in Our Mouths and was printed in the summer of 2025 in a limited edition of three copies. Two copies will be sent out into the world to be read while the third will remain in our studio in North Karelia as a reference and anchor. When a reader finishes the book, it is their task to give or mail it to a new reader. It is our hope that the two copies will circulate slowly over the coming months and years in a quiet eulogy to the inter-library loan system.

The book is free to read. The only cost is to mail it to the next reader. If for any reason you will struggle to pay the postage, please contact us and we will do our best to help. In the first pages of the print publication is a readers’ log. Please add your name (or pseudonym), location and the date you begin to read. If the log pages fill up, please add a loose paper insert. If you choose, you may also take a picture of the log and send it to us at info[at]oncewewereislands.com.

To request a copy of the book please fill out the contact form here, and we will add you to the list of readers. Copies will be circulated in order of signing-up.

The text has also been translated by Aslan into the Queer constructed language Damiá under the title Pier and appears in its own online edition as a downloadable PDF.

We open the cult sci-fi novel from our back pockets and start reading. The story begins — snakes and scars. Letters from a runaway. Study notes and cover versions. A folk song in a new language. A happy ending, and we close the book.

We try again — a recording studio in Nashville. A second hand bookstore. A bus station, a way station, a seedbank. The Scala and the Jeong. Another ending.

One more time — a starship powered by desire. A shell revealing our souls. A forest, singing to another forest. High tide.

Again …?

What do we do when the happy ending doesn’t make us happy?
What do we do with a utopia haunted by ghosts?
How do we know when the story ends?

Seedling, a new stagework from ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS,
navigates a multiverse in search of beauty and meaning in the unending circular mess of our Queer lives. It’s the ninth chapter of the two-year constellation artwork With Forests in Our Mouths and a companion to Palace of Ash & Rain which showed at Ballhaus Ost in autumn ’24.

Chapter Ten

Field Guide

field guide (noun) — an illustrated manual for identifying natural objects, flora, or fauna in nature.

A spell. An incantation. An effect in the world. A field guide is a tool for identifying natural objects. The physical flora that are named within this particular field guide became disconnected from the manual and set loose. Things named. Things as they are. Objects arranged in a certain order. The magic potential of lists. The reciting of names begins to make something happen. Words next to one another. One after another. Words you do not recognise yet. Memories from your future.  Unseen words, mysterious and opaque. Sounds, frequencies, and waves.

The place where you are standing right now is a garden. A wild place. A link between the soil by way of the mouths we open. Flowers sent across oceans and back, collecting voices in their wake. Heaps and heaps of snow. Fauna in the dark. Names waiting to germinate. A circle makes a spell. Without beginning and without end. Ravens spiral over your head, just a bit higher than your ears. Things becoming apparent. Spoken into being. Nothing to see.

A field guide to time and to yourself. A quarter of an hour, and then a half, and then the hour full, and then we are round again once more. Those seconds and minutes stop being something countable. Objects grow under your feet. Seeds in the new world. Countable you.

Bring winter. One song. This song. Not a pop song. Not something you can sing along to. This one. Released in the old century. A record label in a northern country. Bright in the summer and dark in the cold. That’s it. The last song. The one you have to take with you. The song is a field guide. It contains everything you need to begin again.

Field Guide is the tenth chapter of the constellation artwork With Forests in Our Mouths — Speaking Queer Utopias into Being by ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS (2024-25).

Field Guide is a list of one-hundred-and-sixty-eight flowers and plants that grow in Finland, translated into the Queer language Damiá and recited by four voices. The plant names were selected by ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS and translated into Damiá by Aslan. The original voice recordings, along with field recordings of two gardens in North Karelia and Central Finland captured at the tail-end of winter, are transformed by Joni Judén into a looping sound composition. The sound work is presented in the group show SORRY at Loisti gallery in November 2025, and simultaneously in the forests surrounding ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS’ hometown, Outokumpu, and released digitally on the record label True Aether.

“When I was in the safehouse, in the far north, with the other runaways, the days were long. We woke early, did our chores, slept little, but we were never tired. When the sky grew dim — it was never very dark — we sat, the five of us, together, and learned the new words.”

Safehouse is a new one-on-one audio and video performance by ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, imagining in short, sharp detail how we might arrive in a Queer utopia. A yellow book, found buried in a ruin. An absent curator. A shift in time to an unfamiliar parallel future. What would a Queer utopia really look like? What sacrifices would we be willing to make to get there? Would we say ‘yes’ to this new life, or choose to stay behind? Through the Queer language Damiá, we also ask if language itself can be a refuge.

Performance slots are for one audience member at a time, and the performance lasts around 20 minutes. Seats need to be reserved beforehand, using a separate form. Seats will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. If, for any reason, you would prefer to attend the performance with a friend, rather than alone, let us know on the form. You don’t have to tell us why! It is our aim that you will be as comfortable as possible during the performance. The performances are free of charge.

Performances at Titanik Gallery (Itäinen Rantakatu 8, Turku) as part of the XS Festival. In total, there are 18 slots available.
Fri 28.11. between 10:30–18
Sat 29.11. between 10:30–17

Registration form
NOTE: You can only attend the performance by filling out the registration form!

On Sunday, 30 November at 3 p.m., ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS and Titanik Gallery will host a free public workshop and discussion with artist Onur Tayranoğlu, thinking together about the intersection between Queer Autonomous Zones and linguistic separatism. No reservations are needed for the discussion event. The discussion will be held in English and it’s free of charge. Welcome!

The above images include photography by ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS and Óscar González. 

With Forests in Our Mouths is a ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS production, supported in 2024 and 2025 by the Kone Foundation, and part of the Metsän puolella community of arts and research projects. Also kindly supported by Titanik, Silence Residency, TUO TUO Residency, Kaivos Festivaali, Theater neben dem Turm, Ballhaus Ost, Finnland Institut, Lou gallery, XS – Festival for New Dance and Performance, Loisti gallery. 

Additional thanks to: Arnita Jaunsubrena, Kristin Gerwien and the team at Theater neben dem Turm; Karita Tikka, Joonas Martikainen and the team at Hiljaisuus Festivalli; Katariina Vähäkallio and the team at Kaivos Festivaali; Juha Hirvonen and the team from Riveria; the Old Mine, Outokumpu; Mirjami Schuppert and the team at the Finnland Institut; Remi Vesala and the team at Lou galleria; Kaitlyn D. Hamilton & Joni Judén; Olivia Basterfield; Jennifer Bell; Abby Boak; Esther Boles; Niklas Ekholm; Amber Fasquelle; Ethan Folk; Kit Gee; Óscar González; Mmakgosi Kgabi; Inky Lee; Elena Polzer & Fedor Herrmann; Taylor Mac, Machine Dazzle, and Pomegranate Arts; Anu Pasanen; Tuuli Haapanen & Vaski Ylhäinen; Debi Kuisma & Ida Loukkaanhuhta; the poets of Helialá; Xdzunúm Trejo; Anna Matveinen; Juliana Irene Smith & Arvid van der Rijt; Esko Vihava; Claudia Basrawi; Halvard Haldorsen.