My new contact tree and collaborator in Lappviken, the large birch at the outskirts of the park towards the highway, has helped me to feel connected to my new environment, the former mental hospital Lapinlahti or Lappviken built already in 1841. The tree has a huge branch that is easy to sit on as if on a lap of some wise wizard. I began visiting the birch immediately in April when I had signed the contract for my studio in the building, and decided to record a conversation once a month, as I had done with the junipers the year before. I felt like speaking Swedish with the birch and planned to read a poem by Josef Julius Wecksell each time. He is not at all as famous as Aleksis Kivi, whose room is a small museum in the same corridor as mine, but Wecksell lived forty years of his life as a patient here. Besides these monthly conversations spiced up by an old-fashioned poem, I have enlisted the assistance of the birch several times this spring, and recorded brief conversations in English for various purposes. They are all linked to a page on the Research Catalogue called simply Lapinlahti – Lappviken.
 
The first of these extra conversations was made for a performance called Birch to Birch in Bodø, Norway, and for that performance I simply breathed through a blues harp in and for the birch and recorded it as a form of greeting to the birches up in the north. The audience could see the video via QR codes hanging from my hat while I was “playing” for the birches there. The second conversation is called Asking the Birch and it was made for a lecture titled At the Edges of Disciplinary Conventions – Asking Trees for Advice in University of Agder, in Kristiansand Norway. The third conversation called Birch Response, I made for the meeting of the Artistic Research Working Group of PSi (Performance Studies international) in Jakarta. In fact I recorded two conversations, the first in response to the preoccupation of a participant who cancelled her trip and the second version, Repetition with Birch, in response to the preoccupation of another participant who joined later. The latest conversation, so far, Side effects with Birch I recorded for the meeting of the Performance as Research Working Group of IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research) in Melbourne. These conversations were all recorded in June and the birch really helped me in responding to all those challenges in different contexts. Now I feel I can turn to the birch with almost any problem I encounter and I really feel more at home in Lappviken, despite having spent more time travelling than in my new studio here.