Lindman engages in mutual exchange and fine-tuned – subsensorial – listening. Her sessions are an invitation for a diversity of experiences of living on this planet to manifest as pressures, tensions, and tendernesses and are the basis of the writings, sound recordings, and paintings that Lindman makes during or after sessions. The paintings on exhibit were painted during Hardeep Mann’s Tong Ren sessions in 2019-2022.

How to sing a spell to rebuild, reform, and melt the metal of war? Lindman, with Viennese singers, will sing for Lead at a public site in Vienna that is related to the local history of violence and war.

Sessions with Hardeep

I attend weekly Zoom meetings following Tong Ren sessions by Hardeep Mann. Mann conducts these sessions from Boston, USA, but participants join in from all over the globe. According to Hardeep, everyone coming together in these sessions actively participates in the healing process with their own intentions, attention, and whole being.

During the session, Hardeep taps a miniature human shaped doll with a small steel hammer similar to those a medical doctor would use to hit someone’s knee to check their reflexes. She taps on marked points on the doll, following the meridians and lines of nerves present in a human body. As she is tapping, she tells about the points she taps and how these are connected to other parts of the body: organs, brain cortexes, nerves, arteries, glands, etc. In this way, Hardeep taps and directs our attention to different aspects and lines of connections in our body and in our being – a multitude of inner and outer connections.

The tapping and Hardeep’s words evoke in my mind visual associations: lights, color, forms, and lines. These internal images are born out of the entangled reality of Hardeep’s words and my internal and embodied sensations. Following these energies evoked by Hardeep’s tapping and words, I draw and paint the visual world I see growing in front of my inner eye during her sessions.

Singing for Lead

A call to sing a spell for Lead: a collaboration with Viennese singers

Project by artist Pia Lindman (Finland)

In collaboration with:

Sound designer Tuukka Haapakorpi
Voice Artist Heidi Fast
WUK Choir, Vienna, Austria
Kunsthalle Exnergasse and Vienna Art Week

According to Finnish healer traditions, the place of lead is in the depths of the Earth, where it cannot poison living organisms and wreak havoc on nerve cells. However, lead has been dug up to the surface by us humans to serve our industrial and economic – even belligerent – motives. Lead is a preferred metal in bullets, due to its density and heat stability. When shooting a bullet, a shooter inhales lead particles and eventually develops lead poisoning. A visible symptom of lead poisoning is aggression. War breeds war.

On the 25th of November, we sing for lead at a public site in Vienna in relation to local history of violence and war. We will announce the location a week before the event.

Manaus is the Finnish word assigned to the act of speaking or singing a spell that focuses the world’s forces. For instance, one can drive something down into the earth or up into the sky with a manaus. With a manaus, one sets oneself in vibration with the world and becomes a sympathetic part of the forces of the world.

How to sing a manaus, to re-build, to reform, melt the metal?

We start with a few examples: wolves, cod, whales, cattle calls, and a deaf dog. The animals in these examples have one aspect in common. By voicing, they set in vibration a particular relationship of dimensions of the world, such as: ocean water; levels in the atmosphere; and insides of a living body. We train our sympathetic relations, of becoming part of the magnificence of the world, vibrate together our cells and nervous systems. This is the force of the manaus.

In order to sing for lead, we begin with simple exercises that guide you to experience these relationships and vibrate with these forces. We talk through how wolves and whales tune into these vibrations and how human-to-cow sympathy has been established and kept vibrating – throughout centuries. We explore how we can connect ourselves with each other’s singing bodies. We learn to give energy by singing to another human as well as to beings of other species, plants, and matter. A manaus gives energy: moves and transforms. There are no specific scores to begin with, but these exercises will bring forth the scores and possible words that you need and/or want to work with.