Contextualization 2
COLLABORATION WITH NATURE
Mimmi Koponen
CURRENT STATE OF FORESTS AND PEOPLE’S CONNECTION TO THEM
I participated in the open call for Pavilion of Finland at Biennale Architettura 2025 with a team of five other Finnish architects this winter. Our proposal Building According to the Biological Cycles was comparing the histories of construction and forestry in Finland, addressing the current problems of economic forest. We found out that 75 % of land in Finland is forest. 2.9 % of it is untouched forest while 87 % is economic forest. There are 833 endangered species in Finland of which 733 due to economic use of forests. What we recognized as the core of the problem is that fewer Finns know how untouched forest looks like, and therefore the need of protection of natural forests is not recognized. (Juntti et. al. 2019).
This is what Ina Blom is also talking about in her article Possibility of an Island on Pierre Huyghe’s Variants at Kistefos Museum sculpture park. Variants is an artwork on a forested island. The outdoor area is constantly 3D scanned, and 3D printed artefacts based on the scanning designed by AI are being located in the forest, which in turn together with other circumstances change the scanning. There is also a big screen to follow real-time simulation of the surroundings. What is natural and what 3D printed can be difficult to separate from each other. Blom writes: “Huge areas of supposedly untouched Amazon rain forest archive millennia of human intervention; our inability to see these interventions in the way we see cities and monuments is also what enabled particularly violent colonization and exploitation. To perceive forests in all their fullness, (…) one must see as Huyghe’s camera does in the evolving forest simulation.”
What we are suggesting in our open call proposal is that both forestry and construction in Finland, as well as globally, are both becoming unilateral. We argue that built environment, forestry and people’s well-being are all interdependent and none of them can work if not all of them work. The problem is global, but solutions to it are found locally in the local nature. I believe that locality makes buildings last longer when they are made for local needs out of local materials and by locals by hand. This is a way to fight against fast and easy building based on overconsumption.
COLLECTIVE BUILDING AND BUILDING WITH NATURE
As a part of the Open call for the exhibition at the Pavilion of Finland I made a sketch of a Return to nature pavilion that was planned to be outdoors, in the front of the Finnish pavilion. The Return to nature pavilion would have been made of living willow, fallen branches, clay and dried out leaves. In time the structure would have changed, growing and rotting, crumbling and dissolving. Sadly, the pavilion is not going to be in its originally intended location, but I continued working with the idea combining it to my master project Building with natural materials workshops. For my master project I am arranging a collective building and participatory design workshop where we make an entrance gate to Losæter, an urban farm in Bjørvika.
Return to nature pavilion
I have visited Joar Nango’s nomadic library Girjegumpi at Ars22 exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki in 2022 and at Venice architecture Biennale in 2023. Experiencing Girjegumpi the first time was part of the reason why I applied to study in Art and Public Space program, and I was very pleased to be able to attend a lecture by Nango talking about the project. Girjegumpi has inspired my master project. At the lecture Joar Nango gave us, he mentioned that Girjegumpi is a space for discussing. The library travels around and to set itself to new places it moves some items with itself and collects others from the places. Many of the pieces are crafted by different Sámi artists. Handicrafts in the Sámi culture is seen as a practice that connects people to their ancestors and land. In the Sámi culture people are in a partnership with nature, coexisting in interdependence, and nature is seen as part of culture and natural locations as lived and used spaces. I see this kind of relationship with matter, not seeing it disposable, and more holistic worldview as a solution to the catastrophe we are facing.
Test making for Return to nature workshop. Photo by Belén Santillán.
FRIENDLY ARCHITECTURE
At Venice Biennale I stopped by Austrian pavilion, where Anna Jermolaewa exhibited several of her past works. Research for Sleeping Positions (2006, video 18 min.) is a work where she returns to a railway station where she used to sleep on a bench for a week right after coming to Vienna as a refugee. She tries to sleep there on a bench again, but it is challenging because the benches nowadays have armrests.
Seeing this artwork made me think of an episode about homelessness of Arkkitehtuuri kuuluu kaikille (Architecture belongs to everyone) podcast I listened to a year ago. In the podcast Vlada Petrovskoja and Teija Ojankoski that work with homeless people and affordable housing in Finland talk about how public spaces are experienced by homeless people. Homeless are forced to use public spaces. Attempts have been made to exclude them from many public spaces with the help of hostile architecture for example by adding railings to surfaces that are at sitting height.
When I shared the first sketch of the gate with Losæter, they said in their feedback that they were worried that the structure would be too livable and attract someone to live in it. Earlier today, the day of handing in this text, I arranged the first part of the Return to nature workshop that was about designing and making tests in Kuba park. Later in the day I went to see the test gate we built, and I met a homeless person that was sitting in his hammock that he had put between the trees next to the gate. He started to talk to me asking about the structure and sharing his tips of planting living branches. I was pleased to see that a person in a vulnerable position interpreted the space we had made as comfortable and safe. This encounter made me think how easy it would be to build shelters for those in need in the city together with nature.
LIST OF REFERENCES:
Juntti, Pekka, Jokiranta, Anssi, Ruohonen, Anna and Räinä, Jenni. 2019. Metsä meidän jälkeemme. Like Kustannus.
Ina Blom, “Possibility of An Island,” Artforum (September 2023). Online. https://www.artforum.com/columns/ina-blom-on-pierre-huyghes-variants-252193/
Joar Nango on his art and work on Sami architecture. Online lecture. (11.1.2024.)
Austrian pavilion, Anna Jermolaewa, Research for Sleeping Positions, 2006, video 18 min.
Arkkitehtuuri kuuluu kaikille 1: Asunto on Ihmisoikeus (Vlada Petrovskaja, Teija Ojankoski), Arkkitehtuurimuseo MFA, Arkkitehtuuri kuuluu kaikille -podcast series, 2023. Online. https://soundcloud.com/arkkitehtuurimuseo-mfa/arkkitehtuuri-kuuluu-kaikille-1-asunto-on-ihmisoikeusvlada-petrovskaja-ja-teija-ojankoski?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing