Atlantica - 01.07.2004, Page 26

turesque streets. There are little wooden
houses everywhere, quaint shops and
cafés and beautiful purple flowers
sprouting in every back garden. Porvoo
cathedral is stunningly beautiful in its
white simplicity. The rain turns into a
veritable Noah’s flood and we flee to a
backyard strung with marquees. Little
old ladies in traditional garb are serving
coffee and Finnish doughnut rings. One
of them tells us in heavily-accented
Swedish that they’re raising money to
help the local drunks. The local Finns
seem to be impressed when we say
we’re from Iceland, and they greet us
with wide open arms, cousin-style. After
a good chat with a retired pastor who
tells us he used to preach in Botswana
in Finnish with a translator, we step back
into our time-machine (a Renault Clio)
and zoom back into Helsinki.
It’s still raining, which gives us the
perfect opportunity to check out the
city’s cultural sites. First, we drive past
the Senate Square right in the centre.
Rightly dubbed a mini-St.Petersburg,
Senate Square was created by a
German architect called Carl Ludwig
Engel in the early 1800’s. Another inter-
esting fact is that this square has dou-
bled as a Russian backdrop in Cold War
spy films such as Gorky Park and White
Nights. Our next stop is the Museum of
Contemporary Art, called Kiasma. A
stunning and unusual building, it was
designed by New York architect Steven
Holl and the interior is equally impres-
sive. The current exhibition is called
Love Me or Leave Me (until February 2,
2005) and features an exciting selection
of provocative artwork, which according
to the catalogue “is a selection of the
most loved and most hated works from
Kiasma’s collections,” and hopes to
explore the different reactions these
works evoke.
Opposite the Kiasma is the glassy
Sanomatalo, which houses cool stores, a
couple of restaurants and the Design
Forum, a showroom and shop that dis-
plays all the latest in contemporary
Finnish design. I trace my fingers along
the simple lines of smooth wooden furni-
ture and admire the Finnish sense of
“less is more”. Snapper wants to go to
the Finnish Museum of Photography and
tells me that Finnish photography is the
next big thing on the international pho-
tography scene. We head to the other
side of town to Kaapeli on Tallberginkatu,
a massive arts complex that used to be a
cable factory. The summer exhibition on
Finnish photography is utterly incredible
and I spot familiar names such as Elina
Brotherhus and Heli Rekula. We’re in
luck: the museum’s pioneering curator,
Timothy Pearsson is showing a group of
people around. He’s a friendly, chatty
man who tells me that the government
Helsinki
24 A T L A N T I C A
THE LOCAL FINNS SEEM TO BE IMPRESSED WHEN WE SAY WE’RE FROM ICELAND,
AND THEY GREET US WITH WIDE OPEN ARMS, COUSIN-STYLE.
022-28 HELSINKI ATL 304 22.6.2004 17:22 Page 24