Kati Rapia & Ilona Valkonen are an artistic duo from Loviisa, Finland. Valkonen works with plants and performance, and new forms of painting. Rapia works with comics, collage, publishing and photography. They combine their working practices in Notes on the State of the World (Baltic Sea) art project, in which Rapia is specially responsible for photography and Valkonen for the Vieno Motors-like performative workshop. 

Notes on the States of the World is their ecological and community (re)searching photographic art piece and a workshop performance with young people living around the Baltic Sea. They put into practice the Lithuanian edition of the Notes-project as part of the Godzilla art residency. Their workshop took part in their outdoor studio on the beach in Preila (village near Nida), where they worked with local young creatives.

The workshop started with treasure and sea trash hunting with the participating kids (sometimes this happens also with local artists/activists depending on the location). Pieces of plastic, sticks, flowers, feathers, seaweed, string, fishbones, seashells, reeds… all you can find can be used as material! After that Rapia and Valkonen assisted everyone to create documentary outfits out of the found material with tools and ideas, and then the outcomes were photographed. This project started in 2020 from their own shore with their kids while restricted by pandemia, and they have been widening it since that — already in Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and now in Lithuania. The idea is to go around the whole Baltic Sea area and eventually have an exhibition about the project.