Finnish artist using apocalyptic images from Estonian bunker for Venice Biennale exhibit
|
|
|
By Marko Leppänen
A year ago in April it was a dazzlingly sunny day in Sillamäe in the east of Estonia, but a chilly northerly wind blew from the Gulf of Finland. Finnish artist Jussi Kivi hardly noticed the bite of the cold in the industrial area of the remote city. He concentrated on putting on his protective mask, and checking the batteries of his flashlight.
The man was going through some of Estonia’s stranger places, looking for kindling in the ruins to fan the flames of artistic inspiration. His tour included abandoned military bases and disused factories, as well as wastelands created by the quarrying of oil shale.
In front of him was something fascinating again: the steps to an old underground bomb shelter. The door had been lost to scrap metal thieves, and the steps were covered with the leaves of several autumns, as well as debris left by homeless vagabonds. nevertheless the place seemed strangely enticing.
Down below the artist stumbled on something more macabre than he could have imagined. There he could see some of the most intense and most paranoid aspects of the Soviet Union in the state in which it had been abandoned 17 years earlier.
The bunker had been used for training by rescue services. On its walls stood an apocalyptic poster exhibition, depicting both civil defence activities, and tasks for the fire brigade before and after a nuclear attack.
The posters differed from the Western tradition of public service announcements, in that the illustrations actually revelled in doomsday visions with bright colours. Mushroom clouds rose up and ghostly armies wearing gas masks operated in flaming ruined cities.
The bizarre nature of the discovery was certainly not diminished by the fact that it was in Sillamäe that the uranium for the first atomic weapons of the Soviet empire was enriched.
Kivi, who is in the running for this year’s Ars Fennica prize, knows a thing or two about rescue work. All his life he has been a fire brigade enthusiast, compiling an impressive private fire museum. The gallery of horrors drove him wild.
“It was a treasure trove”, he sighs nearly a year after the trip. “It is quite incredible that it had remained intact”.
There were posters on the walls, as well as on shelves that had been overturned. The printed material was partially consumed by fungus. Kivi felt that he was doing the responsible thing, preserving of old art of sorts, when he took some of the material with him. At the same time, visions of new works of art to form in his mind, even though he did not see all the way to Venice yet.
Kivi is going to the Venice Biennale, Europe’s largest exhibition of modern art, as the representative of Finland. He is currently compiling a work of art out of the nuclear disaster posters and the objects of his own fire museum under the name Fire & Rescue Museum, which is to be put on display in the Aalto pavillion at the Biennale from June through November.
He characterises the posters as symbolically delicious material.
“They are exotic in a banal sort of way - a kind of nuclear romance, combining the depiction of total destruction with the illusion of the possibility of survival. The artist has taken full advantage of the drama. The style is something in between children’s books and comic strips, a little bit like Tintin.”
At his studio in the Sörnäinen neighbourhood of Helsinki, Kivi is compiling a list of his fire brigade material. There are model cars and fire stations, helmets, banners, pictures, and much more. Hundreds of artefacts are mostly in banana crates. If they were outside the boxes, they would fill the whole room.
The collector has not spent money on his collection. The objects were given to him as gifts over the years. That is why nearly every object has a story. “This helmet was given by a fireman from Hamburg as a gift to an Icelandic woman artist. However, they never became a couple, and I got the helmet”, Kivi explains.
Previously Kivi did not want to bring out his fire museum in any artistic context, even though there had been inquiries. “I wanted to keep it as a place of refuge from the art world. However, with the posters, the situation changed. Now my fire collection can be a means of telling a story.
He does not want to revel in decadence. The aim is to remind people that the world continues to sit on a pile of nuclear weapons, and that countries use missiles to intimidate others as if they were street gang members wielding switchblades. Preparations are constantly being made in Finland for nuclear destruction, Kivi points out, even though the public at large does not think about that sort of thing.
“Our building also has a bomb shelter, a Geiger counter, and goods that are required. I recently read a news item according to which the view in the construction sector is that civil defence is one of the most unnecessary laws, which makes building more expensive.”
Kivi’s childhood home was in Käpylä in Helsinki, right next to the local fire station. Looking through his own window he could se the fire engines rush out. The men on a certain shift would let the junior fireman hang around at the station, and conseqently, no vaccine could have prevented the fire fever that ensued.
He enjoyed spending time at fire stations so much that his father once had to force him to come home from one on Christmas Eve, so he could open his presents. The young boy drew pages and pages of fire engines, and tactical firefighting maps that he saw in professional journals.
“One of the firemen actually joked that Jussi will probably become an artist”, Kivi laughs, and says that his first work that was accepted for public exhibition depicted a forest fire. For years it hung on the wall of his elementary school.
His childhood enthusiasm for fire brigades climaxed during a visit to the United States. The cousin of his grandmother worked as fire chief in the small town of Warren, Ohio, and in the summer of 1971 Kivi followed the activities of the fire department there for a month.
However, deep inside he began to feel that he would not go into the profession that he admired so much. His own path took him somewhere else. Still, he continued to collect fire-related paraphernalia, until a “hangover” set in.
“At the end of the 1970s I went into a phase of social awareness and a need to improve the world. There were some very serious people in the group, and a collector freak like this would not have been understood very well. At that time I even scratched myself out of many fire brigade photographs. Fortunately this phase did not last very long.”
Kivi is best known for his photographs depicting terrain, and his map drawings, whose style calls to mind geographical research from a century ago.
Along with his artist friend Oliver Kochta-Kalleise he runs the Romantic Geographic Society, which organises exhibitions and field trips, including the bunker trip to Estonia.
Winter is turning into spring. Kivi is clinbing up a hill in a forest. The landscape is quintessentially Finnish.
It is hard to believe that it is in Helsinki. The area is actually part of the land that was annexed to Helsinki at the beginning of the year - the so-called Vantaa wedge where the border with Sipoo used to run.
“It is almost too beautiful. This is as if it were from the paintings of Pekka Halonen or Akseli Gallen-Kallela”, Kivi says. At the summit, a pile of stones marks a Bronze Age tomb. To the east, the view is astoundingly wild looking, considering that it is part of the Helsinki region; there are forests and water.
Kivi turns his gaze toward the south, where a hill in Vuosaari, which used to be a landfill, can be seen. “That is Finland’s southernmost fell. In Lapland it is possible to feel small, but on top of that pile of trash, you feel even smaller, thinking about the amount of human consumption.”
As a teenager, the future artist lived in the pine-scented idyllic world of young people’s exploration books, and imagined that somewhere even further away there would be a hazy edge of a forest. The mythical wilderness kingdom, of which every Finn has a mental impression.
The youngster packed his gear and went off to search for this untamed forest, only to find the labyrinths of forest vehicle roads, and the official exhibition nature in the national parks, with signs everywhere.
“It was all so underlined that there was nothing left any more - only the desire to get back home”, Kivi ponders.
Fortunately, the adventurer realised that today’s untamed frontier was to be found somewhere else: in the urban wilderness, in coarse wasteland, unfinished non-locations. Those areas are uncharted, undefined, stimulating to the subconscious, and surprising.
“You can come up against anything: a safe blown up by thieves, or a burned-out car”, he says, enthusiastically. “Those places have a repulsive attraction.”
In his own words, Kivi could never be persuaded to go to Mt. Everest, but he actually longs to visit an Estonian slag heap.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 5.4.2009
MARKO LEPPÄNEN / Helsingin Sanomat
|
| 7.4.2009 - THIS WEEK |
 Finnish artist using apocalyptic images from Estonian bunker for Venice Biennale exhibit |
|
