Vilja Achté: V01D Plushies

For the summer, Luonnos will be populated by V01D Plushies, creatures from the end of the world. Plushies are comfort buddies that provide hope for overturning the looming future and mascots for facing the present moment. Bond with these beings, as they are meant as transitional objects in living through the forthcoming environmental changes and thus help cope with the evident losses we are about to endure. 

Plushies, figurines, puppets… Toys have talismanic qualities in the sense that they are more than what they appear to be. They have an ability to transport us, teach us, and protect us. Many avant-gardists throughout history have been fascinated by toys. Walter Benjamin noted that toys communicate meaningfully about the time in which they are produced, reflecting their relationship to folklore, psychoanalysis, and art history. According to Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, the ideal toy inspires, defeats dullness and trains the body and mind.

Climate change makes us all feel like children, as if under the haphazard authority of an unpredictable, more-than-human parent, suggests philosopher Timothy Morton. This causes people to develop an anxious attachment style with the surrounding world. The collective trauma that we are living through is in many ways insidious and operates on multiple levels at once. The V01D Plushies project started out as an attempt to give shape to this shared experience, focusing specifically on the notion of disappearance. Each character has been created as a response to material and immaterial extinctions that we are likely to endure, if radical changes to the way we as humans relate to our surroundings do not take place. The process continued by creating poetic texts of V01D Plushies, which formed the basis of the characters’ visualisation process. These texts have been fused into a poem, which can be heard and seen at the exhibition.

Digitally sculpted V01D Plushies are not created only of the more typical materials for toys, such as fabric and plastic, but also of unlikely and imagined substances such as ozone, liquid petroleum, hopes and dreams. Plushies are depictions of processes where technology, industry, labour, human emotions and aspirations, and natural phenomena are intermingled. Additionally, the characters’ fragmented bodies suggest a rethinking of the figure-ground, subject-object divide, which is centrally present in our conceptions of prototypical storytelling, where a human or a human-like character has agency over the passive backdrop of an environment. In contrast, V01D Plushies are crafted of the environment and cannot be separated from it. 

These images of plushies have been produced in a time of extreme visual saturation, and in a culture where there seems to be an active process of redefining what images mean, how they are produced, how they ought to be read, and by whom. The V01D Plushies have been created by digitally sculpting, blending, stretching, moulding, extruding, smoothing and branching out polygonal shapes in representational 3D space behind a screen, even though they could have also been created by writing prompts. It’s suggested to take each image as a token that can transport us to storyworlds, which could help us rethink our relationship with the environment. 

Vilja Achté is an artist based in Helsinki. Recently, she has been exploring story structures that could complicate and expand the character/environment division. She is interested in the potential of digital narrativity and, more broadly, the ways in which visual culture is made, read and theorized in the present, through our changing relationship with software and tools. She holds an MA in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art, and a BA in Graphic and Media Design from the University of the Arts London. Currently she is a practice-led doctoral student at the Aalto University department of Art and Media, New media.
www.viljaachte.com

The opening of the exhibition will be celebrated on Friday, June 6, from 17:00 to 19:00, welcome!

7.6.–10.8.2025
Vilja Achté: V01D Plushies
Luonnos, Uudenmaankatu 13, Helsinki
Wed–Fri 12–17, Sat–Sun 12–16, free entry!
(Closed: 19.–22.6. & 2.–31.7.)
@luonnostila