Aukko | Interdisciplinary collaborative project and exhibition | Vapaan Taiteen Tila, Helsinki, 2022

This project was carried out in collaboration with Leena Reittu, Jeanette Holmström, Dominik Fleischmann and Jussi Nykänen.

This year-long project brought together a collective of artists and photographers, whose deeply felt concern for the 2020 clearcut of an old-growth woodland in Pirkkola Forest, Helsinki Central Park, has led them to seek new and meaningful ways to connect with the area, and to pay their respects to what has been lost and the struggles -both human and non-human- preceding this moment. It culminated into the Aukko exhibition at Vapaan Taiteen Tila in 2022. The exhibition acted as an archive of the area: its little stories, memories, inhabitants; a tribute to the activists and protesters who defined the foundations of our practice; a time-capsule to a peculiar moment of fearing the inevitable destruction and feeling helpless in the face of it; and a pre-post-mortem, that can act as an educational tool for future activists facing similar issues to the ones related to the case of Pirkkola. The outcome of this collaborative, long-term project acted as a reflection of the collective’s need to create a space dedicated to their shared sense of loss: a space for grieving, but also for caring, wondering, and above all, hoping.