The invisible city growing beneath an Arctic capital

Just below the most famous ice in Lapland is a city of 200,000 people overlooking the Baltic Sea. Oulu, also called "the Silicon Valley of the North," is one of Europe's most important technology hubs, where for example Nokia develops its 5G, 6G and artificial intelligence technologies. Although few people know it today, in the 19th century it was the world's main hub for the export of tar, which was essential to supply the large fleets of Britain, France and America. Oulu is also the 2026 European Capital of Culture, and its ecosystem is among the fastest transforming on the planet. Its landscape alternates between ice and vegetation in a delicate balance to maintain. That of being many things seems to be its one true nature. This very aspect, an integral part of the city's identity, is the starting point-along with Finnish mythologies related to the boundary between life and death-for a site-specific work by Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, created as part of the Oulu2026 program.

The work, which will be inaugurated in September as part of the Lumo Art & Tech Festival, is inspired at the same time by Finnish myths about the afterlife and the botanical seed banks kept right in Oulu, places where life and memory are in a state of suspended animation. "Fusing folklore, artificial environments and ongoing ecological changes," reads the presentation of the work,  "The work questions whether humanity has created a new form of life beyond nature: a fragile world that could outlive us." It is through this digital dimension that Steensen observes and narrates the nature and balance of Oulu.

Themes, deeply connected to the Northern European city, its history and identity, are also typical of Steensen's artistic practice, which in his works uses video game-derived technologies, virtual world-building, environmental sound recording and manipulation, and photogrammetry to digitally archive endangered and emerging ecosystems. Steensen, who always creates his works in close collaboration with environmental scientists, composers and philosophers, often makes monumental and site-specific works with the goal of constructing new environmental narratives. The resulting works are at once virtual, somewhat abstract, and deeply connected to the materiality of the place where they are located.

In this sense, Oulu is no exception. The work Steensen has developed for Oulu2026, whose working title is Underground Clash, will be located in the underground parking lot of Kivisydän, which runs beneath the city center. Kivisydän is a cavernous space, enclosed by massive blast doors that also make it an air raid shelter if necessary-a not insignificant detail, especially in recent years, in a country that borders Russia by more than 1,000 kilometers, that after decades of neutrality recently joined NATO, and where defense spending continues to grow. Rather than concealing or disguising the nature of the place, Steensen's work will interact directly with its underground architecture, letting concrete structures, depth and darkness become an integral part of the narrative.

The simulated virtual world of Underground Clash-which Steensen, as per practice, has been working on for months with lengthy site visits-will focus on endangered subarctic ecosystems, tar conservation practices, and the de-extinction floral seed bank at the Oulu Botanical Garden, but it will also investigate "our abiding emotional connection to endangered ecosystems."

The themes are many, but one only has to look at Steensen's works, or at the images released in the preview of Underground Clash, to see that this is exactly the point: to bring together, to hold together distant worlds with seemingly few points of contact between them. Only in this way is Steensen punctually able to create, with a completely new aesthetic code, a mirror up to the complexity of the real world.

In fact, what struck and inspired Steensen, again, was precisely the multifaceted essence of Oulu and the variety of cues it offers: "there is a strong technological identity, but also a deep connection with nature. I am interested in working on both of these aspects simultaneously. What excites me about Oulu2026 is not only the opportunity to make my works here, but also to see the whole city transform." In Steensen's practice as in Oulu, nature, technology, and art-the physical and the virtual, the poetic, the dreamlike, and the material dimensions-merge, giving rise to completely new worlds.

Opening image: Botanical Garden of the University of Oulu. Photo Linnea Laatikainen