A small crowd gathered at Kilo Harbour, a fishing village in Haukipudas municipality, building anticipation as the end of the hour approached. At 10 sharp, a recording emerged of local fisherman Elina Halonen speaking one word into the morning air: “Miehiään” – about their men. This was the final part of a reading of Pentti Saarikoski’s Finnish translation of Homer Odysseyis broadcast from a statue on the harbor wall at a rate of one word per hour, a pace that would take the entire saga 10 years to tell. It’s a fitting way to access the Climate Clock, a permanent art trail spread throughout the Oulu region as part of Oulu’s year as European Capital of Culture 2026, which asks us to tune into a slower, deeper sense of time than the one most of us carry in our pockets.
On the same day, we sat down to a lunch of spinach soup and Karelian-style pancakes filled with rice porridge in the church hall in Yelikiminki, a few hundred meters from another of the track works. It was a minor moment in a busy two-day itinerary, but it stuck with me as a kind of summation of the whole project: down-to-earth, made with and for the people who live there, and completely uninterested in performing in front of an audience that might not be paying attention (yet).
The Climate Clock is among the key projects of Oulu 2026, the year-long program that celebrates Oulu’s status as the European Capital of Culture. Oulu, a city of just over 200,000 located just south of the Arctic Circle, is the urban core of a 40-municipality region spanning nearly 30 percent of Finland’s land area — an area where, according to the scientists involved, the temperature is warming at about four times the global average. Curated by Alice Sharp, Artistic Director of Invisible Dust UK, and produced by Claudia Woolgar, the project brought together six Finnish and international artists with scientists working on the most pressing environmental questions in their corner of the region, and their works have been found in sites ranging from a Stone Age settlement to a motorway tunnel. The seventh work, in cooperation with local communities, covers the entire region.
Trail shaped by ice, mud and lichen
In the central square of Oulu, Rana Begum is installed No. 1574 stonea series of granite and marble shards – spectre-blue, Baltic brown, and light green Lapland marble – cut to resemble shards of broken sea ice. One side of each piece is painted metallic silver, evoking the sheen of melting glaciers; The other is polished smooth enough to reflect the sky and people walking past. Begum developed the work with Alun Hubbard, a glaciologist at the University of Oulu, whose footage of the Greenland ice avalanche has been described as eerie yet beautiful at the same time. Sharpe suggests that the North Pole could become ice-free in summer by 2040, a fact that gives Begum’s shimmering, broken shapes an unsettling tinge even on a bright June afternoon.
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“Climate clock“ |
An hour or so north, at the Keriki Stone Age center of Yli-li, Ranti BamEli ella Located next to the still waters of the lake: a family of large clay vessels, shaped by the pressure of the artist’s body, are placed on a Douglas fir platform. Bam, who has British and Nigerian heritage and lives in Paris, was struck by fragments of Stone Age pottery in the museum’s collection, some of which still bear the fingerprints of the people who made them thousands of years ago. Working with physical geographer Jan Heort, who showed her how this stretch of land has been slowly rising from the sea since the last ice age, Pam came up with the idea that clay and landscape are doing the same thing, on different time scales. How we hold the land shapes what remains, she said.
Where the PAM ships lie beside the calm waters, at the Kuytili Cliffs of Keminki, the river (outside the winter, at least) runs fast and loud, and the Antti Laitinen River Olet Tassa (You are here) He responds with something playful, almost subtle, not monumental: Circular display windows woven from twisted branches frame views of the water, while two large balls – junipers, planted with a “cocktail” of native lichen – rotate slowly in the wind like miniature planets. Laitinen, a Finn who grew up nearby, worked with botanist Jokko Rikkainen on lichen, a slow-growing organism that is a reliable indicator of air quality. Some of it will die. Some of them will spread and eventually cover entire domains. The artist simply said that he did not know what would happen to the work – “nature will decide.”
Back in Yelikiminki, a few steps from the lunch table, Takahiro Iwasaki’s giant tar barrel is filled with snowflakes. Constructed by local carpenters using traditional methods, it nods to the region’s history of tar-making and to the adjacent symmetrical neoclassical church, designed by Finnish architect Jakob Regev – a building whose drawing, Iwasaki notes, shares something of the geometry of a snow crystal. Inside, he carved his own snowflakes, which were meant to be viewed through peepholes as if magnified under a microscope. The viewing apertures themselves are set at different heights to track hanki kanto, the hard crust that can form over deep snow and is strong enough to walk on; When it becomes thick enough, in the winter, visitors will be able to look down into the barrel from above and peer through the openings at the top. There are 112 pieces of ice inside, 112 of which, as Iwasaki likes to point out, is the number Finns call in emergency situations. His hope is clear and straightforward: Take care of the environment, and no one will ever need to name it.
In Olonsalo, along the road leading to the airport, Gabriel Curé transformed a tunnel and a side of the road, placing cut-up and reassembled rocks amid the relatively urban landscape and painting lampposts in a green-to-red gradient for a standard risk-assessment scheme, developed in collaboration with climate scientist Kevin Anderson. It is, on the face of it, the most obvious of the six: many of us have filled out a form using these colors, and we all know what red means. But Currie framed it as an example of a working style he returns to again and again, where he takes something intangible, an experience or an idea and compresses it into something tangible, a number or a color or a chart. However, he suggested that “some kind of circular motion is implicit in the very title of the work: Risk assessment Risk assessment It circles back on itself in the same way a risk chart does, ranging in color from cool green at the bottom up through yellow and orange to hot red at the top, quietly ignored by the people making the decisions.
All the Climate Watch stuff promotes slowing down and deep thinking, but in fact, Superflex works Super kilo Not even really for us. Developed in collaboration with behavioral ecologist Alex Jordan, its blocks – cut from a single piece of pink-veined stone – are shaped using an algorithm that maximizes surface area: good for humans to sit on, but designed, as Rasmus Nielsen of Superflex explains, with another audience in mind. The fish are the group’s new collaborators, and the pink color for the sculpture was chosen because, in a few hundred years, coral polyps may drift north as the Baltic Sea warms, he said. It is the same statue that broadcasts the recording of the Halon reading OdysseyOne Word Per Hour: A piece of art made partly for an audience of fish, and directed into the future 10 years, or a few hundred years in the future.
An hour of moments
If the six permanent works, each of which “Climate Hour” is based in one place, then the seventh element –The most expensive watch in the worldwritten by long-time collaborators Tailervo Kalinen and Oliver Kuchta Kalinen, both Finnish, is the thread that runs through them all. Over several years, the duo held a series of “Twelve Dinners” in local communities, asking residents what they valued about their daily lives and local environment. In collaboration with a team of eight local volunteers with no previous watchmaking experience, the results were built into a large electronic mechanical clock: a clock hand consisting of 12 short films about local endangered species and habitats, produced in collaboration with regional scientists; The minute hand features 60 “precious moments” donated by residents, from one family’s tradition of walking in the snow wearing wool socks to the ice dancing team’s practice; On the other hand, more than 100 fleeting clips were sent from people’s phones. The watch will now tour all six Climate Clock sites before heading to the museums in Tornio and Hämeenlinna. Kalinen said it would become a “time capsule,” capturing what life is like in Oulu in 2025 and what people value.
It’s worth noting how strange all of this is. Many of these artists have represented their countries at the Venice Biennale – known for its beauty and prestige. Here, however, their work, rooted in Finnish suburbia or wild nature, working alongside snow hydrologists and lichen specialists, is something most of the art world would never meet. Sharp described the project as an attempt to break out of the ordinary tyranny of clock time and move into something else: a space, as she puts it, “between the sign and the toke,” where entirely new worlds can be imagined. That is more or less what each of these seven works asks visitors to do, whether standing in front of a giant ceramic vessel, staring into a barrel of sculpted snowflakes, or waiting on the harbor wall for the next word of an epic poem. Whether a pause like this is enough to change the way a remote region with such rapid warming is viewed, by its residents or by the rest of the world, is another question. But for a few days in June, in the church hall with spinach soup, or on the harbor wall waiting for one word every hour, Oulu felt like just the right place to put that word forward.
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