Santa Maria da Feira, Aveiro, Portugal, May 20, 2025 (Lusa) - The Finnish company Lumo will debut at Imaginarius - Santa Maria da Feira International Street Theatre Festival, in northern Portugal, with a show featuring ‘Keto tree’ trunks, which are used to produce a flour that costs €170 per kilo.
These are some of the aspects underlying the performance ‘Phloem’ , which, resulting from a commission by the management of the aforementioned event in the district of Aveiro and the Metropolitan Area of Porto, will combine gastronomy with contemporary circus, media arts, light and sound - always with free performances at 10 pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday in the garden of the Municipal Library, subject to prior reservation of seats.
The concept has already been rehearsed at the Imaginarius Creation Centre, where Lumo's artistic director was in artistic residence, and will combine two ranges of vegetable props on stage: a selection of nettles, dandelions, wild fennel and other wild herbs collected in Feira and prepared during the show itself, to be tasted by the audience during the exhibition; and trunks of so-called ‘Keto trees’, transported by road from Finland to serve as scenery - including as a table where the culinary art of the performance will be served.
The particularity of these trees is their life cycle, which gives them the status of ‘unique in the world’, as Hanna Misala explains to Lusa: "They can live for 300 to 400 years and then die for 30 to 50 years. That's when they turn into a Keto tree - hard, grey - which remains standing for another 300 to 400 years".
The trees chosen for Santa Maria da Feira were "carefully selected and all have a different meaning" in the show, since "some were used only to produce phloem, others will be used to make sounds and others will function as aerial devices" for the performers' acrobatics.
As for the show's cuisine (which was one of the requirements of the artistic call launched by the festival's management to highlight Feira's status as a UNESCO Creative City in the field of gastronomy), Hanna Maisala anticipates: "The food we will taste is the heart of the tree, its phloem".
The artist reveals that in Finland, so-called ‘phloem flour’ made from tree bark is traditionally added to white flour as an ingredient for making bread, given its ‘filling’ capacity, which is particularly valued in times of war and periods of famine. "The heritage associated with the production of phloem flour has almost disappeared today and it is now very difficult to find, so it has become a luxury product that costs €170 per kilo," Hanna Maisala points out. "But we managed to produce some of this flour from pine trees we brought from our country and found someone in Portugal who was able to make more for us to use in the show," says the artist.
All these aspects of keto trees and their phloem will be combined with the sounds of foliage and branches, the crackling of trunks and human voices, not only of Finns, but also of citizens of the United Kingdom, where the company has already performed, and of Portugal, thanks to recordings at the Santa Maria de Lamas Museum, where the company was also in artistic residence.
The aim is for all these elements to "reflect the life of a tree over hundreds of years", in a metaphor for fragility and renewal - even when all the work "progresses towards darkness".
"Merging gastronomy and art deepens the symbolism of natural elements such as wood, and preparing food creates a new connection to the cycles of nature," says Hanna Maisala, arguing that these gestures highlight "the possibility of hope" and the awareness that "life goes on, despite its fragility."
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