COMPANION of At and bui - Ateneum
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COMPANION
m
teneu
uilding of A
b
ns and
he collectio
to t
guide
a fictive
Miina Pohjolainen English translations Kasper Salonen 2020 Produced as part of URBANAPA X ATENEUM 2020 festival
The little booklet you are holding, or rather the
FOREWORD digital content on your screen, is an alternative guide
composed of momentary fictional scenes intended
to lead you deeper into Ateneum’s architecture and
the museum’s main collection, telling the story of
Finland’s art history. The short texts highlight certain
works and places in Ateneum through various
narrative voices, opening portals into different eras,
past and future. The stories approach the Ateneum
Art Museum as a tapestry of historical layers.
My hope has been to peek into a different type of
future from the one now facing us by intuitively
approaching and following the words that come to
me. How are we to dream of the future in a time
when our world is surging into a deepening climate
and global health crisis, gaping wealth inequality,
and widespread polarization?
I have tried with these texts to describe this kind of
dreaming in sometimes painful ways, and to think of
a utopia as a process rather than as an unattainable
objective. I’ve wanted to meditate on what it would
feel like to live in a utopia, rather than theorize its
culture; what are the small acts or gestures that could
germinate a utopia?
Miina Pohjolainen
There used to be nothing here at all before. Well ok
that’s not true, there was lots of stuff.
Tall, wind-tossed grass, mud with earthworms living
inside. All kinds of microbes with homes in the
ground. Roots. Small rodents. The horizon. Gray or
dazzling light. Light from thousands of light years
away, from a star that may no longer exist. Slush, ice,
and snow. The clatter of wagons, the clop of hooves.
Someone told me that when this museum was built
they thought this place was complete back country.
People at the time were like, “what’s the point of
building an art school in the middle of nowhere?”
Then these stones were shipped in from Estonia and
Staircase there are fossils in them from so long ago we can’t
wrap our heads around it.
What if this place was still like it was before, when
there was nothing here at all? If this national
identity-boosting and canonizing utopia hadn’t come
Fossil, orthocene to pass? Whose utopia was this building anyway, and
225-495 millions of years can this place even be a utopia anymore? How could
Estonian limestone this capitalization of art for the sake of recreation
and tourism be turned into something else?
Sometimes I just wanna scream. Like, THINK
ABOUT THAT EARTHWORM IN 1888, BURIED
UNDER ALL THIS. But people rarely think about
earthworms.
This whole house is killed earth under our feet.
Innumerable people have sat on this chair and it has
carried all their weight through the years.
As a museum guard I often sit here, resting my tired
feet and counting the minutes until the end of my
shift or the start of my break. Sometimes someone
would sit next to me and start talking to me about
art, their memories and their life. It was nice,
even though I was trying to make sure no one did
anything out of line.
In a picture from the war, this room was decorated
with birch trunks, Finnish flags, and the flag of
Nazi Germany. The bigwigs drove in front of the
building in their cars, climbed the majestic steps to
Exhibition hall 13 this hall, held speeches at a podium in the corner,
shook hands, and sat on these very same chairs. The
propaganda posters on the walls witnessed every
occurrence. Now no one wants to talk about or be
reminded of this dirty historical time.
Wooden Chairs Now.
undated
wood I sit on the chair and try to fill it with a different sort
of reality. With every outward breath, the space is
slowly filled with some other power, with a gentler
being, that covers the walls, the roof, and the floor
like a layer of dirt. But it isn’t dirt, it is rather a layer
of hope. It floats onto the seat of the chair like a mote
of dust and attaches itself to the next visitor; you.
“What do you think about when you think about the
future?”
“I dunno. I guess maybe your skin.”
‘Cause you’ve got those scars on your belly and
deeper under the surface. Stitches in your womb.
How your womb has been cobbled together, so
something new could just about grow down there.
So you have that hope, if you decide to have it
someday.
And that’s exactly how the future is ravaged by the
present. That’s how it stays stitched together.
Exhibition hall 15 The fabric can be sewn back together, but it leaves a
mark. And there in the safety of that scar something
Auguste Rodin: Danaïd new may be forming. Even if you always turn your
1885 back to avoid revealing your scars, they will not
marble disappear.
It’s like these days and what we and the generations
before us have done to this place will definitely leave
a mark on the future.
But it can still make it, under the scar tissue.
In the morning, before the museum opens to the
public and before the guards begin their shifts, I
wipe the dust off this window sill. It has become a
habit of mine to gently caress the window latch as if
it were a lucky amulet, while looking out through the
window into the canopied courtyard.
In place of the museum shop I see a wild field and
a stand of young trees. They are reaching toward
the light filtering down through the broken ceiling
glass. With my gaze I follow the gentle waving of the
meadow, the buzzing of the honey bees, and the slow
rhythm of the blades of grass. I breathe in time with
the wind, and I am filled with a profound lightness.
Exhibition hall 18 I draw a peace sign onto the surface of the window
sill, chuckling at the innocent absurdity. The sign
slowly dries and disappears, but I know it’s there. I
push along my cleaning cart and decide to draw a
new symbol tomorrow.
View from window to the courtyard
2020
Do you remember what it feels like when after a
warlike rain the sun starts to dry your face and fills
your eyelids with dazzling light?
When you have to close your eyes to the brightness,
but even with eyes shut you see only destruction in
yourself and your surroundings?
And you hope that the sunlight will take it all away.
That when after a long time, when you finally open
your eyes, your heart won’t leap from your chest in
a panic but drum out a steady beat as a sign of new
times.
That through the cracks of the murdered earth,
Exhibition hall 6 between the asphalt sidewalk and the building’s
stone foundation, dandelions start to grow; their
seeds fly with the wind, farther and farther. You don’t
even need to blow on them, they fly away on their
own.
Elga Sesemann: Self-portrait
1945
oil on canvasI applied to study here three times in the 1970s. I was
never picked. When I come here decades later, I still
feel the dry coal dust wafting from the drawing room
in my sinuses.
I hold my grandchild’s hand, the soft and sticky
touch protects my stomach from fluttering in
apprehension. As if the painted walls were mocking
me. You are not enough. For a fraction of a second
there is no different between the present and that
moment when I walked down the stairs and out of
here, head bowed.
I breathe in, I squeeze the little sticky hand a little
harder and I throw back my shoulders. Places such
Exhibition hall 8 as this have tried to oversee art and guard the gates
to canonized artisthood for centuries, but finally
they produce nothing but a Chinese-made magnet
that someone will buy for a few euros to stick to
their fridge at home.
Fire extinguisher Presto I demand something different.
undated
I daydream about opening the fire extinguisher
cabinet and watching how the white foam would
start to spread across the walls as an extension of my
physical movements.
I leave the scene will my back straight and a tiny
hand still in mine, and I thank my lucky stars that I
never ended up in this rat race called the art world.I searched online for information on a Mrs. Siuts
Barbarus. The first results are for a Johannes
Barbarus, born Johannes Vares, who was an Estonian
doctor, socialist, and poet. Siuts Barbarus, actually
known as Emilie, was Johannes’ wife. Her historical
role as a wife binds her, even in the 2020s.
A few clicks later I first see Johannes Barbarus in his
coffin, and then I find a picture of Emilie lying in
hers, with a bouquet of flowers upon her stomach
where her hands are crossed, eyes closed. What was
the last thing those eyes saw? What kind of light
filtered through those closing eyelids?
I stared too long at the burning light of summer and
Exhibition hall 9 my computer screen, and now in the dimness of the
museum my whole vision is teeming with dots of
light that I can never catch.
Emilie and a doll in front of the landscape. Emilie’s
hands in a strange position, with a small yellow bird
Adamson-Eric: Portrait of Mrs. Siuts Barbarus in her right hand. The soft blackness of the dress
1928 enshrouds the body inside. What sort of world did
oil on canvas Emilie dream of, draped in the black softness of her
clothes?A solar eclipse attached to the wall. A small spectacle
of what life would be like without light.
Even if the Sun were to be snuffed out right now, it
wouldn’t get dark on Earth for another 8 minutes
and 20 seconds. That is a period of grace we can
imagine in our own bodies, and it is a moment we
can choose to use differently. What would you do in
that time?
I would probably look really closely at all the things
I love, at the friends and strangers here now, and I
would record the motion of their pupils; how they
would look back at me with a small smile or even
just with indifference. In the darkness I would carry
Staircase between exhibition halls 11 and 5 their gazes with me and I would look into their
eyes again, while the limits of my own body were
becoming fuzzy.
Would the light fade out gradually, or would it be
like shutting off the lights in a windowless room?
Lamp
undated According to some estimates, the Sun will end
light, opaque plastic, black tape its life in about 5 billion years, and even the most
resilient microbes on our planet will only last about
2.8 billion years in the growing heat. It feels like a
comfortingly long wait. Even if we completely mess
everything up now, something would still abide here
unbelievably far into the future.Werner Holmberg
Robert Wilhelm Ekman
Aleksander Lauréus
Johan Tobias Sergel
Rembrandt von Rijn
Bertel Thorvaldsen
Peter Paul Rubens
Michelangelo
Erwin von Steinbach
Benvenuto Cellini
Jules Hardouin-Mansart
Bernard Palissy
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
Nicodemus Tessin the Younger
Carl Ludvig Engel
Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander
Rafael
Feidias
Exhibition hall 33 Donato Bramante
This motley crew of artists has peered down into
the street for more than a century. What might they
see with those eyes of plaster, can they observe the
passing of time? That the future is not theirs? They
TV screen
have built their buildings, painted their paintings,
undated
crafted their artifacts, and sculpted their sculptures.
screen, electricity and image presentation
Now it’s our turn.
Whose head will be immortalized in plaster and
whose head will decompose in the bosom of the
earth in silence, sinking into oblivion?
A truly equal world neither needs nor tolerates
figureheads cast in plaster, nor any forms of hero
worship.
Look out for the pigeons, you elderly craniums! I
won’t shed a single tear when your white gypsum
skin begins to crack and peel.You can also read
