A Complaint Free World

Rev. Will Bowen of Christ Church Unity, Orlando had the vision of creating a world free of complaints. To help achieve this, he created the 'complaint free bracelet' (discovered by the Kalleinens whilst in Chicago), which you wear and swap to the other wrist whenever you complain. The aim is to break the habit of complaining by being complaint free for 21 consecutive days. It's not to try to stop people from being dissatisfied or saying what they want to change, but rather help people to see beyond the problem instead of focussing on it. To back this up, he explains that Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech is remembered for its potential positive solutions to bad situations, rather than the moment where it describes a metaphorical bounced cheque. 

The media caught on to this idea and it quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. People everywhere have used this simple act of moving a bracelet to transform their lives. One example is of a man who was reduced to a wheelchair after being shot. He used the bracelet as part of a process spanning a number of years of his life, when he reestablished his attitude as one of forgiveness. Instead of complaining, he prays for the best in the man's life who shot him no less than he prays for other people, and for good to come out of the situation.

Founders

Finnish born Tellervo Kalleinen and German born Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen live and work in Helsinki, Finland. They have collaborated on projects since 2003, and they won the largest art award of Finland, Ars Fennica, in 2014. When they first met in 1998, Tellervo immediately knew 'he was the man', but it took Oliver 3 years to agree! They are very different people, and Oliver explains that she has taught him more about himself, relationships, and how to communicate his feelings better.

It is this care for people and relationships that provides the base for Tellervo's aesthetic concerns. When she was part of a girl's choir in her early art school years, they featured in an advertisement in the newspaper which said that they were willing to go to anyone's house to perform for them, so long as they were able to document the performance for potential future use. Their one invitation led them to a man's house, where they sang the Finnish national anthem, and after their performance he showed them some holiday photos. This man, however, made the situation uncomfortable by being naked throughout their visit. Tellervo later concluded that it was partly uncomfortable because it wasn't truly participatory - both sides were doing things at each other rather than with each other, so she decided to start working together with people in their homes to develop ideas.

Oliver also doesn't like working on his own. There is one project that he considers having initiated on his own, but it still involved working with people. Since him and Tellervo collaborated, any project they do is participatory and starts with the assumption that there might be a need for it. They then send out an invitation for participants to see whether they are right or wrong (more on that here). Throughout the Complaints Choir project, they made  particular care to ensure that people were only there because they wanted to be; it was okay for people to leave the project if they weren't having fun, though people had a range of motivations for staying.

The Choir Project

Inspired by Complaints Choir of Cairo, this project was born in May 2010 in Egypt to invite people from a range of backgrounds to create a song in a week-long workshop, based on their hopes and concerns, thoughts and feelings, and jokes and woes. Similar to the Complaints Choirs, the workshop consists of writing lyrics, except it also involves communal improvisation and composition, rather than the responsibility for composition resting mainly on one person's shoulders. Unique results occur every time; the only constant is the collaboration of the community in active participation in order to express themselves, with no prejudice towards anyone in the choir. The choir provides a short performance of their song at the end of the week of workshopping, and one performed at the Music Freedom Day in March 2011.

Collaborated Projects

The First Summit of Micronations
This was held in August 2003 in Helsinki. Micronations are entities that persistently claim to be an independent nation or state, yet are not officially recognised by other world governments or major international organisations. This convention was a three-day event where representatives from six micronations held a closed, round table discussion, a gala evening and temporary embassies. It was produced together with the artists' association MUU in the context of the Amorph!03 festival, which Tellervo and Oliver curated that year.

YKON
Based in Helsinki and Berlin, YKON was founded in 2005 in order to continue working on the topic of micronations, through advocating unrepresented nations, experimental countries and utopian thinkers. As part of the field of contemporary art, YKON's aim is to help the dissemination of knowledge in these unrepresented nations through a cooperation between the approaches of all fields of study, such as education, architecture and the economy. The Summit of Practical Utopias was also born out of the Micronations Summit.

Speech Karaoke Action Group
Together with 11 other artists in 2010, Tellervo and Oliver developed a karaoke system for speeches. This works in the same way as normal karaoke, except with speeches instead of songs, ranging from famous dictator speeches, lines from films or private wedding speeches. They can be performed and spoken in any desired style, and in workshops people may add a speech of their choice to the system to be performed at a karaoke club evening. The project was developed in the context of the exhibition: 'I am a socialist-anarchist-individual-collectivist-individual-communist-cooperative-aristocrat-democrat.' - produced by the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts and curated by Oliver and Tellervo.

What I Wish I Had Learned In School
Founded in 2012, this project invited people to create a 45 minute lesson about what they wish they had learned in school, that would have considerably helped them and prepared them better for life. Of those who replied to the invitation with a topic, 10 people prepared a lesson about their chosen subject in workshops facilitated by the Kalleinens. The lessons ranged from practical skills such as drilling holes to personal life lessons such as dealing with death and disease. They were delivered in a classroom style environment with 15 minute breaks between each one. Like the Complaints Choirs, this project was open for anyone to participate.

People in White
They have also worked on a number of short films together. One of them is 'People in White', a film created between 2011-2012 that explores the complicated relationship between doctor and patient in mental health care, with 10 patients sharing their experiences. It was chosen as the best feature film at 'Lo Spiraglio Film Fest', an Italian film festival about mental health. The trailer can be viewed here.

I Love My Job
Another similar film project with 3 episodes covers 3 real employees of Gothenburg and Helsinki (a puppet theatre actress, a storage worker and a chef), and the unbearable situations and unresolved conflicts at their workplaces. Each one shows fantasies of how these employees wish to bring an end to their situations, giving the chance for them to act out their wishes from their darkest moments. Here is the trailer. A theatrical version of this project was performed at HAU in Berlin, 2008, the same location for the Berlin complaints choir 5 years later.

Information about other projects and films, including their current project 101 for all, can be found on Tellervo's website or their joint website. 

Effects, Outcomes, and The Future

One interesting effect of the project is the humour it can bring to those who participate. When the Kalleinens started out, they did not know if it would be overly depressing, but in the very act of taking the two activities of complaining and singing seriously, it became clear during the first Birmingham rehearsal that combining them makes for a very funny project. These activities are not inherently related, but both are ones that people enjoy doing.

Though it is difficult to truly evaluate how much each specific complaint brought about a positive change in the lives of people involved or their country (and this is not something the founders wanted to evaluate), the media frequently reported on the project, which would have increased its impact. There are also some choirs that continued updating their songs. For example, one of the DIY choirs in Hong Kong got in the habit of composing a song related to whatever demonstration was taking place, so it could they could sing it at the demonstration. In Cairo, the DIY choir then formed into a 'utopia choir' as the reverse of the complaints choir concept, and inspired The Choir Project, which sets up community-based choirs that can cover any theme relevant to a particular group of people (other than just complaints - more on them here). This 'utopia choir' was born just before the uprising of 2011.

The Choir Project.

There are some potential personal results that may well ring true for some of the choir members, too. The opportunity to share complaints that may not have been shared before, in a setting where everyone is accepting and doing the same thing, can give strength to an individual. Being able to create nice sounds together with other people, when an individual may not be a good singer, can give them confidence and satisfaction. People enjoy listening and especially working together to achieve something that is good, which can be therapeutic. For other people, it provided an opportunity to do something a bit different or strange. The diversity of issues sung in such a range of ordinary, real voices, 'in all their colour and individuality' (in contrast to the blandness of the pop music industry), ensures each voice is heard and made to feel accepted and included. As with the blues, it has brought music into daily experience of suffering, and as with what blogging has done to mass media, it has put the voice of the individual into the limelight. From a historical viewpoint, it has also created important records of human experience.

Therefore, there is a wide variety of possible outcomes, either on an individual or collective level, and it is important to the Kalleinens that they don't dictate the outcome. The idea of it being an 'open source' project allows it to be transferred to an array of different contexts, where it can work equally well in different ways. People can use it as a tool and modify it to fulfil their needs. 

One Man Complaints Choir, Canada.

After the unexpected success and widespread continuation of the project, with choirs in over 20 countries, the founders hope to develop their website into a platform where people can showcase their own video material. Besides that, they see their role as becoming increasingly to help people use and develop the project in a way they find appropriate, as well as take a back seat and observe.

Values, Ideals, and Political Involvement

Though the concept helps to represent people by making their private problems public, it is important that people aren't labelled as representative of particular groups such as age or class, or made to feel stereotyped; each person is an individual representing themselves. Effort was taken by the Kalleinens to ensure that invitations to their choirs were distributed across a range of neighbourhoods and media, so that they could get as mixed a group as possible and get people to interact with others they wouldn't have otherwise met. The inclusion of eating food in the steps to create your own choir is there as an additional way to invest in the community experience created by the choir, especially since there is such a lot of work to do in a limited time frame. Usually the choirs were diverse, though after taking the project worldwide, the founders saw some general trends regarding types of people that took part: often more women than men would join, aged between 40-60, as well as more educated people interested in culture. 

Complaints Choir of Helsinki organising complaints.

Hong Kong roadside exhibition to collect complaints from the public.

Leading on from this, it is seen as especially important that any complaints choir is approached with an empathetic and non-judgemental attitude. Every complaint should be taken seriously, whether big or small. This creates a solidarity and a better understanding of different points of view, and when someone in the choir doesn't agree with a particular complaint, everyone will be singing their complaint too, which creates a powerful effect even if other people don't care about it. It also helps to put things in perspective and provide the sense of humour mentioned above; it is possible to care about small things as well as global injustice, and okay to do so, especially since those things that are closer to home form part of our identities. Equally, complaining about the bigger things alongside the smaller things can help people feel better about the smaller things.

As can be seen here, only 7.5% of complaints in the first 8 Kalleinen choirs were politically related, and the founders have stated that the project is not intended to primarily be a form of political protest, unless a community wants to use it in that way (why should important issues such as broken underpants be ignored?!). The idea is to provide a free space where people can choose to address various issues. However, they have noted that personal complaints could still be interpreted as political, since they can imply the nature of a capitalist society (or otherwise), which would increase the above percentage. Additionally, the unfortunate situation in Singapore meant that the choir was banned from public performance and thus politics was more heavily involved, despite the few expressly political complaints in the song.

Aims, Roles, and Participation

Tellervo is convinced that keeping complaints inside and not dealing with them will cause people health problems. She was particularly surprised, when visiting LA, of the attitude of always answering 'How are you?' with 'I'm fine', since people in Finland are always honest, and the Complaints Choir Documentary records a complainer from the Chicago choir* offering the same view that complaints should be expressed with a view to making the situation better. 

A crucial vision of the project was to help people not only express their complaints and channel that energy in a different, creative way, but to examine and view the complaints in a more positive light, and maybe start to occasionally 'smile at their neighbours'. People are challenged by their frequent tendency to negatively complain through taking part. The powerful act of people coming together to sing about and share their complaints in unison, whether everyone in the choir can relate to them or not, brings a sense of mutual understanding to be able to move forward and do something about it, rather than just remain static. Complaining becomes not just a purpose in itself, but 'a fun way to share your annoyance[s], laugh about them, discuss [them] and in some cases also take action'. This also extends to the audiences of the choirs. 

Though complaining is often defined as 'dissatisfaction without action', it is often the starting point and has the potential to bring about change, particularly when enough people complain about the same thing. Sometimes the complaints are directed at things that cannot be changed or controlled, such as the weather, in which case the role of the complaints choir is to build a communal feeling to remind people that they are not alone in a lot of their struggles, which improves the situation. 

Using the universal act of complaining as an art to bring people together means that one of the main principles of the choirs is that anyone can start one and join, whether or not they can sing. On a practical level, this means that the created songs should not be too complicated (though it is still a challenge to put together and perform a song with many people in a short space of time). The song should also be uplifting to some degree, in order to help people feel more energised and positive about their complaints. 

Tellervo and Oliver see their role as 'party hosts' for the choirs. They want to make a nice invitation, make people feel welcome and like they want to be there, but create a space for the people who actually make the party and not take up too much space themselves. It is also important that people are able to connect and make friends.

Having said all this, the Kalleinens explain that when setting out the project, they tried to keep free of any straightforward goals, and rather approach it as just being active members of society. All of their projects are open invitations for anyone to take part, so if people join in, then that indicates a need and shows the concept can work. The idea is that the collaborative experience is provided.

*this complainer also produced the following quote, which I believe sums up the idea behind the project quite nicely: 
'You can't complain about your bonsai tree. You can only work on it.'