Finland’s Glass Pavilion in Venice

There are moments in Venice when time seems to stop. One of them happened on a bridge in Murano, when Finnish opera singer Outi Kuusilehto began to sing.

The shopkeepers stepped out of their little boutiques and onto the street to see what was happening. People walking along the canal stopped in their tracks. For a moment, the entire canal seemed to hold its breath. Venice listened. Outi's voice travelled between the centuries old buildings, across the bridge and over the water.

The singing continued later on a piazza near the exhibition venue. A woman and her grandchild appeared at a window above the square and they began to sing Ave Maria with Outi. They were crying. So were some of us below. It was one of those moments when art stops being something we look at and becomes something we enter.

The Savonians had arrived in Venice.

Some things are difficult to transport in a suitcase. A stubbornness to make things happen with whatever is available and a belief that even the most unlikely people, materials and ideas can somehow find their place together. Over the following days, Finnishness kept finding its way into the story from the most unexpected directions: At the magnificent Saturnia & International, the hotel's chef baked karjalanpiirakka, Karelian pasties, for our panel discussion on the future of design. 

I had invited Ryle Tuvierra, Brandi Clark, Charlotta Vilamo and Tatu Ahonen to the conversation for a very specific reason. I believe that if we want to create real change, we have to be willing to talk about uncomfortable things. Especially in the field of design. It is easy to gather around a table, exchange compliments and congratulate ourselves on how progressive the creative industries are. Design has power. It shapes what we see, what we value, who gets heard and whose perspective is considered worth designing for. We talked about things that hurt, the structures that need to change. About responsibility, representation and the gap between what we say we believe and what we actually do. Sometimes the most concrete way to create change is to say the uncomfortable thing out loud in a room where people can hear it. To challenge the way we have accepted the world to be.

LÄHDE

We live in a time designed to keep us moving. Swipe. Scroll. React. Move on. In Murano we wanted to create a space for stopping. There is a difference between being still and being passive. Stillness can be an act of resistance. It can be a way of taking back our attention. Lähde installation I created together with Jouni Leino, was built around a simple idea: what happens when we give people permission to stop?

At the centre of the installation was Ilmari Mäenpää's original composition, Siunaus (Blessing), created especially for the Venice and played on the kantele and jouhikko. There was something unexpectedly powerful about hearing these ancient Finnish instruments in Venice, because their sounds seemed to carry a landscape. Siunaus is entering a Finnish sauna as a state of mind. The music became a blessing. Not a religious statement, but an invitation to be present. Janne Hirvonen's video became a window into nature, or a memory of it. Together with Robert Castren, we had taken the sculptures out to the skerries around Helsinki, where Janne was filming sea, sunlight, northern lights, rock and wind. In Venice, smoke moved through the installation and across the images, making the Finnish archipelago bleed into the Venetian lagoon.

One day, a crying child was carried into the installation by his father. They stayed for a while. Gradually, the crying stopped. The child fell asleep in his father's arms. I remember looking at them and thinking that the work had suddenly become very simple. The child did not need to understand the sculpture. He needed somewhere to be and that was enough. Couples came into the installation and stayed. Sometimes they talked quietly. Sometimes they simply sat together. They looked at the work, listened to the music and remained there far longer than anyone had expected.

In a world where we measure so much of our lives in speed, efficiency and engagement, their staying felt almost radical. Nothing was being achieved or consumed. They were simply there. We have become very good at measuring what matters. Views. Likes. Reach. Growth. Productivity. Efficiency. Engagement. But how do you measure a child falling asleep?

Bukowskis

My sculptures and Jouni's furniture were sold through a Bukowskis auction during the summer to fund the journey. The horse sculptures and benches changed form. A glass sculpture became hotel accommodation. Jouni's bench the freight that carried the project to Venice. One of my horses travelled from Helsinki all the way to Hotel Saturnia, where it became the setting for our discussion panel. The objects were sold, but the work continued as a journey, a room, a conversation, a meeting between people. That became the hidden structure of the whole project: art can move. It can leave the gallery. It can become a kilometre, a boat ride, a hotel room, a conversation. It can stop being an object and start becoming an experience. What we had made over years, transformed.

What is Savonia?

What I find most interesting about bringing Savonia to Venice is that it says something essential about how a region creates its future. Finland has an enormous creative potential, but potential does not become an international presence by itself. Someone has to make the first move. The City of Kuopio and Savonia University of Applied Sciences understand that investing in creative fields sometimes means making an opening before there is an established model for it. Savonia's support for its graduates is part of the same idea: education should not end at graduation. It should create routes into working life, into networks, into places where new possibilities can emerge. That is not a small thing. Starting from zero never is.

For Kuopio, this also means bringing local expertise visibly into international contexts rather than waiting for someone else to discover it. The relatively small investment that brought experts to Venice, built the visual identity and created the video material was therefore more than production. It was a way of making a region legible beyond its own borders. And this is where I see something deeply Savonian. There is a certain stubbornness in walking into the forest and make the path by walking it. That is how I understand Savonian courage. As a willingness to build something before anyone can guarantee that it will work. And once a path exists, others can walk it too.

Collaboration

During the summer, people who had barely known each other began spending more time on the phone with one another than with their own partners. Tatu Ahonen was editing videos deep into the process. Ilmari Mäenpää was composing almost entirely by instinct. Timo and Peter were originally only supposed to drive the materials from Helsinki to Venice, but they arrived and stayed and built the entire installation. That is when I knew the project had become something else. The roles were no longer fixed. People stopped asking where their responsibility ended and simply started doing what was needed. We were actually testing what happens when you put trust, stubbornness, craft, curiosity and a little bit of madness into the same room and remove the instructions.

What actually happened

A singer stood on a bridge and made a city stop. A child fell asleep inside an artwork. A pair of glass earrings disappeared with a thief. Somewhere between all of this, people who had barely known one another started spending more time together, because the work had become bigger than the roles we had given it. That is what I think culture is supposed to do. Not confirm what we already know about ourselves, but put it under pressure. Not export a polished picture of a place, but allow that place to enter a room and change the temperature. 

Knowledge disappears when it has nowhere to go. Skills disappear when nobody uses them. Craft becomes heritage when it is admired but no longer allowed to evolve. Internationalisation, at its best, is not about leaving home behind. It is about creating enough traffic between places that knowledge can travel both ways and return altered. 

I would rather make the thing that gets out of hand and change shape. The things that crosses borders and comes back carrying something none of us put in it.

The Future

When the exhibition ended and freight day arrived, Jouni and I carried the Lähde table and my glass sculptures by hand to their next destination, the extraordinary Loft gallery at Berengo Studio in Murano.

After everything it had taken to bring the work to Venice, there was something fitting about carrying it forward ourselves. Now the pieces stand in remarkable company, surrounded by artists from around the world. The exhibition was over. The journey was not.