Biography

Ella Prokkola is a landscape architect, artist and educator based in Helsinki. She graduated from Aalto University (FI) and completed additional studies at ENSP Versailles (FR). Her work explores the impacts of the post-anthropocentric paradigm in landscape architecture and the possibility to examine emerging landscape narratives with the tools of living arts. Her current projects examine cartography and architectural graphics as tools for multispecies storytelling. In 2024-2025, she was a fellow at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (FR) and ZK/U Berlin Center of Arts and Urbanistics. As an educator, she has taught landscape architecture and multispecies thinking in Aalto University and Estonian Academy of Arts, as well as facilitated workshops for students, professionals, and citizens in Finland, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany.

Artistic project

Urban hydrology is not only a technical or ecological system but also a choreographic one: a set of rhythms, gestures, and metamorphoses. When examining almost any European river, one discovers a history of abuse and anthropisation: meanders straightened through canalisation, drained wetlands, flows and floods regulated by dams and megastructures. These ruinous landscapes of post-industrial rivers can be understood as hybrid entities: cyborg landscapes or river machine gardens. We can't completely undo the impacts of centuries of modifications, canalisation and urbanisation on water bodies around which we have built our cities. Instead, we have to learn to compose with these hybrid bodies of water.

"Scores for the river machine garden" studies anthropised hydrology through the lens of choreography and notation. Moving beyond conventional cartography, it explores how the rhythms and polyphonies of urban waters can be translated into “graphic scores”—devices registering time and motion. Responding to calls for new cosmograms, the project aims to create choreographic and cartographic devices capable of expressing the polyphonies of the living world that often remain unnoticed. Besides the publication, the project includes workshops and performances, both discovering and enacting the scores of the river machine garden and activating urban space through embodied action.

Format: lecture-performance, participative fieldwork

Size of audience: 8-20 people 

Specific location: alongside canals, creeks and other anthropised water bodies

Timing/duration: various durations