Artist Biography

Valtteri Alanen is an object theatre maker and sound artist based between Helsinki, Finland and Prague, Czech Republic. Having graduated with an MA in Directing for Devised and Object Theatre from DAMU, Prague (2022) and a BA from the now defunct Puppetry-program of Turku Arts Academy (2019), he is most at home with process- and material oriented works of performing and sounding arts. Valtteri roots his artistic practice in an expanded understanding of puppetry, seeing it as a continuation of an age old art form that recognises the agencies inherent in objects, sees materiality as all-pervading, and practices an artistic form of mundane everyday animism. A puppeteer is someone who enters and accommodates the rather illusory cut between the Cartesian subject and object, whether they are handling objects or processing sound, facilitating the performance of stuff and things.

He is a core member in Trial & Theatre, an experimental Finnish puppet-theatre group known for their performance series, transfroming recent research in applied physics to microscopic puppetry Nano Steps. In collaboration with scientists from Cornell University, Aalto University and The Institute of Physics in the Czech Academy of Sciences, he has focused on developing acoustic manipulation methods for microscopic puppets with ultrasound, and on musical composition with scientific instruments.

Valtteri is in a deep ongoing artistic collaboration with live artist, actor and dramaturg Eglė Šimėnaitė, and has worked as a sound-designer with Ismael Falke, Mali Weil, Marjo Kuusela, Czech Institute of Theatre and Merja Pöyhönen, among others.