Soundings of the Helsinki archipelago

The popular cultural environment-themed lectures at the Helsinki City Museum continue. During the spring, three interesting lectures will be heard every other Wednesday from 24 April. This lecture will be held in Finnish.

The first lecture will be given by PhD Markus Lähteenmäki. His lecture presents new views of the built landscape of the Helsinki archipelago, asking where the boundaries between built nature and the built environment, the city and the archipelago, history and the present day, as well as science and art are.

Lähteenmäki presents the Instruments of Occupation research project and installation, which is a joint work implemented by Artist Dan Dubowitz, composer Tuomas Toivonen and curator Markus Lähteenmäki at the exhibition space of the National Archives of Finland in 2023. The new audiovisual installation, the core of the work, sounded the military construction heritage of the Helsinki archipelago by means of image and sound.

It was accompanied by an extensive presentation of the fortification plans drawn up by the Russian engineer command for the archipelago off the coast of Helsinki, as well as drawings made by Carl Ludvig Engel at the same time for the new monumental centre in Helsinki. The entity made visible tensions that easily go unnoticed, trying to re-establish our relationship with our environment and its meanings, drawing from history but looking towards the future.

Markus Lähteenmäki is an art historian and curator, who works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki and as a visiting researcher at University College London.

Upcoming Cultural Environment Wednesday lectures:

Wed 15 May at 5 pm, Marikit Taylor: Helsinki Tales. The City Described by Travellers Past (in English)

Wed 29 April at 5 pm, Tuija Väisänen: Landfills and shore structures (in Finnish)

Photo: View of the Instruments of Occupation  installation. June 2023, National Archives of Finland. Dan Dubowitz.