I have produced over two hundred casts for the Mänttä Art Festival 2023 to create a giant 9.5-meter climbing wall. The Participatory Climbing Event is to be facilitated as a part of the exhibition, where visitors are able to climb the wall with the help of professional climbing instructor Felix Damski. The video projection was placed in the upper part of the wall of the exhibition space. The feeling of the space below emphasised the essence of the performance captured in the video. The series of climbing interventions on the Helsinki streets took place in 2021.
The Mänttä Art Festival is the largest summer exhibition of Finnish contemporary art. The award-winning Mänttä Art Festival is a destination regarded highly by art professionals and much loved by the general public. XXVII Mänttä Art Festival will be open from June 11 to August 31 2023.
Out of Nowhere is the title for the 2023 Mänttä Art Festival. In this summer’s exhibition, 36 artists or artist groups were invited, for a total of 44 participants. The curators Minna Suoniemi and Petri Ala-Maunus have invited many young artists.
Many places in Finland still bear traces of World War II – some wounds left by bombshells are still visible on the granite of Helsinki city walls. I filled these craters with resin, the same resin used for the mass production of climbing holds for indoor sport climbing. The act of climbing in my project is a tangible way of understanding. But today, the old traces of war are becoming hot again. One can burn fingers by touching them. The tragic outbreak of the war started by the Russian invasion of Ukraine dramatically changed our attitude towards memory. The principles of how we used to work with traumatic memories of the past will never be the same again.
Every cast on the wall is linked with a particular location on the map of Helsinki at www.climbingamemory.com. Visitors are invited to use QR codes below every cast to follow their own path through the Climbing a Memory project.
