Utopias Lahti is a visual arts festival organised by a team of young artists in the city of Lahti, Finland since 2021. For producing the festival, the team has created a model with circular economy at its core in collaboration with local businesses and the public sector. All the festivals exhibitions are produced with a zero waste principle, all materials are first and foremost sourced through a network of local circular economy partners and cycled back into material streams after the festival.
National
Finland
Päijät-Häme, City of Lahti
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
Lahti - The European Green Capital 2021
No
As individual(s) in partnership with organisation(s)
First name: Henri Last name: Airo Gender: Male Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Production in collaboration with: The Lahti Association of Photographic Artists, Kauno ry
Circular economy partners: Painovoima ry, Hartela oy, Lehtisepät oy, Isku oy, Pedro oy, Malva Museum
Pedagogical partners: LAB University of Applied Sciences, Art High School Gaudia, Art School Taika, Lahti Folk High School
More information about the festival partners on the websites: https://utopiaslahti.com/ and https://climateutopias.cargo.site/ Age: 26 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Finland Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Karjalankatu 8 B 18 Town: Helsinki Postal code: 00520 Country: Finland Direct Tel:+358 44 3444549 E-mail:henri@utopiaslahti.com Website:https://henriairo.com/
First name: Toivo Last name: Heinimäki Gender: Male Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Same as above Age: 27 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Finland Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Pohjankatu 43 C 23 Town: Helsinki Postal code: 00610 Country: Finland Direct Tel:+358 45 6508898 E-mail:toivo@utopiaslahti.com Website:https://toivoheinimaki.com/
First name: Kaisa Last name: Syrjänen Gender: Female Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Same as above Age: 25 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Finland Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Karjalankatu 8 B 18 Town: Helsinki Postal code: 00520 Country: Finland Direct Tel:+358 40 0213302 E-mail:kaisa@utopiaslahti.com Website:https://kaisasyrjanen.com/
First name: Ronja Last name: Siitonen Gender: Female Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Same as above Age: 25 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Finland Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Lielahdentie 8 as 12 Town: Helsinki Postal code: 00200 Country: Finland Direct Tel:+358 44 3290797 E-mail:info@utopiaslahti.com
Utopias Lahti is a visual arts festival created by a working group of young members from the Lahti Association of Photographic Artists. The festival was organised at a prototype stage for the first time in November 2021 (15.11 - 30.11.2021) under the name Climate Utopias. Climate Utopias 2021 was a part of the official program of the Lahti - European Green Capital 2021 year. After the first instalment was successful, the festival team has worked to grow the festival into a bi-annual event organised in the city of Lahti, Finland every two years. Right now the festival team is working on the second instalment that will take place in May 2023 and the third instalment in 2025.
In its exhibitions Utopias Lahti builds a space centered around artistic practices that activate speculation, conjecture and imagination as catalysts for systemic change. We can only build the futures we can imagine. The festival program aims to activate artistic practices as a way to share knowledge, imagine alternative futures and quicken social imagination.
In its production the festival aims to create a model for utilising local circular economy in the core of event production. All the festivals exhibitions are produced with a zero waste principle, all materials are first and foremost sourced through local circular economy and cycled back into material streams after the festival. For this the festival team has built a local circular economy network with local partners from different fields. The festivals large material needs, such as constructions, paper and fabrics, are met through this network. As a result, in its curation the festival works as a testing ground for developing new ecological exhibition practices in the presentation of media art and visual art. The circular economies concept is designed to be replicable in different locations and the team actively works to spread the template to other events, institutions and actors around Europe and the world.
Visual Arts
Art as Catalyst for Change
Sustainable Aesthetics
Circular Economies
Event Production
The Utopias Lahti concept is designed with a replicable model for utilising circular economies in production as its core. Our key objective has been creating a festival that fulfills all its material needs from local byproducts and waste through local circular economy along with selected partners from which we source the materials. In producing the festival we are creating novel ways of using materials received through circular economies in exhibiting visual art. For creating the festival we have built a network that provides the materials needed in building the exhibitions. At the moment our network consists of 5 local collaborators:
1. Newspaper printing press Lehtisepät oy, from which we receive leftover rolls of newsprint paper. We use the paper to print large photographic works shown at the festival.
2. Construction company Hartela oy, from which we receive their waste wood, plaster and brick materials. The festival hires a carpenter who makes frames, walls and other exhibition structures from the materials.
3. Local fabric and furniture factories (Isku oy, Pedro oy) from which we receive leftover fabrics. The fabrics are used to print photographs, as surfaces for projections and as curtains to darken spaces for video works.
4. A papermaker (Painovoima ry) who makes recycled cotton rag paper out of cotton sourced from gas station bathroom towels. The paper is used experimentally to inkjet print exhibition works.
5. MALVA Art Museum who gives us their leftover exhibition structures.
Our approach to sustainability and circular economies is not only limited to trying to use sustainable materials where we can, but it underlines all the planning and work that goes into the exhibitions. At the festival, sustainability and circular economies act as boundaries for exhibiting art, but are not thought of as obstacles but as possibilities to think about new possibilities in exhibiting visual art and creating new, sustainable exhibition practices.
The festival concept for the curation of the exhibitions is to activate artistic production as an engine for social change by imagining utopian futures, challenging everyday ways of thinking and presenting new ways of approaching large structural issues. The festival builds a space for artistic practices that activate speculation, conjecture and imagination as catalysts for systemic change. In the exhibitions the viewer is provided with a space to reflect on their everyday views, see alternatives and encourage imagination as a tool for problem solving. Global crisis are approached from the perspective of action, imagination and hope.
In 2021 the festivals theme, Climate Utopias, featured works that imagined alternative utopian futures in the face of the climate crisis. In 2023 the festival concentrates on artistic practices that create tools for getaways from current political, social and economic conditions and investigates ways to sever relationships between industrial capitalism and the materiality of photography.
Another key concept in building the festival has been the activation of underused commercial space in the city center of Lahti. In the 2021 all the exhibitions were organised in three unused commercial spaces in the city center, along the ordinary routes of citizens. Photographic art was brought into spaces that were previously banks, shops or restaurants. This activated city space, brought liveliness to the center of the city (that has become more empty with shops closing down in the last 20 years) and brings photographic art to new audiences by confronting them with it in their everyday environment. The exhibitions brought a positive, energising change into the city space and reached a wide local audience. In 2023 we are looking to use multiple large (over 400 square meter) office spaces in the city center for the exhibitions.
Our highest priority in planning the festival is that a visitors financial status or mobility does not limit their ability to participate in the program. All the exhibitions spaces are selected on the basis of physical accessibility and feature access for persons with limited mobility. All the festival exhibitions, events, artist talks and workshops are open to all and offered free of charge for the participants.
In designing our exhibitions we are working to challenge the top-down, one-to-one curator-artist production model of group exhibitions and instead focus on modes of co-creation. In the process of designing the festivals group exhibitions we work to foster spaces for communal exchange of ideas, where all the artists and the curator are simultaneously present and the planning happens in group form.
In all our financial activity we are looking to build fairer, more equal working conditions within the field of arts. We are on the forefront of establishing artist payments as a staple practice in the Finnish art field. We pay all professional artists participating in the festival an artists fee for the right to exhibit their work. In 2021 all the artists were paid a 500€ artist fee. In 2023 early career artists will be paid 300€ and the artist fee for late career artists was raised to 600€. In 2025 we are working on raising all the fees to 1500€.
Along with artists, we use an equal pay model for the salaries of everyone who are employed directly by the festival. Everyone from the artistic director to the festival carpenter is paid the same salary, which is at this time equal to the monthly amount of an artists working grant in Finland. For the 2023 festival the equal pay amounts to 2060€ per month for each employee. For the festival in 2025 we are looking to raise this salary.
In the 2023 instalment of the festival we are also featuring a three-part pedagogical program that aims to collaborate with local youth, provide them with a platform and involve them in making the festival.
The first part of the program is produced in collaboration with the LAB University in Lahti. In this part of the program the festival team works with one class of students in the photography department of the university to make an exhibition with them for the festival through the circular economies model. The program aims to establish sustainable exhibition practices in the working methods of next-generation photographic artists by giving them practical information on sustainable exhibition practices.
The second part of the pedagogical program is developed in collaboration City of Lahti, Gaudia - Lahti Arts High School and the local children’s art school Taika. This part of the program consists of 10-20 student workshops that are organised with each of the participating institutions, where the participating students are guided to explore and share hopes and fears they have about the future of their immediate environment in Lahti through photography. The workshop is run by the festival pedagogue and the images made in the workshop are presented in an exhibition during the festival. This part of the program is aimed at providing local youth with tools to voice their thoughts about the future with photographic art as a medium.
The third part of the program is developed in collaboration with local secondary schools. Classes from local secondary schools will have to opportunity to participate in a half-day workshop organised by the festival pedagogue. In the workshop the students are encouraged to take the view of more-than human entities in their local environment through photography. The workshop aims to offer youth an experience relating empathetically to other species they interact with daily.
The Artists Association of Lahti helped us in finding sources for funding and have connected us with collaborators to start our network of local circular economies.
The cultural department of the City of Lahti have worked with us in developing our model for finding spaces and have helped us in locating underused commercial spaces in the city.
The Lahti Green Capital project provided us with the platform to test out the concept at the prototype level in Climate Utopias 2021.
The local circular economies development center Painovoima Ry have helped us in finding novel uses for recycled materials, and were a central partner in developing the cotton paper for inkjet printing for the 2023 instalment of the festival.
On a European scale we are collaborating with Neatherlands based Breda Photo Festival to exchange knowledge and provide a platform for young European photographers to present their work in Lahti. Together with them we produce an exhibition of European photographers engaged with Breda Photos International Talent Program, a program that supports studying and recently graduated photographers through multiple programs. Breda Photo has provided us with valuable knowledge on their model for exhibition spaces, which is similarly based on finding underused spaces around the city.
The festivals pedagogical program has been designed in collaboration with LAB university, Art High School Gaudia, Art School Taika and Lahti Fold High School. These institutions have helped to make the program impactful and a strong educational opportunity.
The festival is supported financially by many national backers. In 2021 the festival was funded by The Otto A. Malm Fund, Finnfoto ry and Kestävä Lahti Foundation (Green Lahti background organisation). In 2023 festival is funded by Arts Promotion Center Finland, The Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, The Regional Council of Päijät-Häme, The City of Lahti, Finnfoto ry and Minela Foundation.
The festival concept has been developed by our festival team, comprising of young experts in photographic art, curating and artistic practice. The festival team collaborates with the artists exhibiting their work at the festival to design and produce the exhibitions. This exchange is done in an open and discussive manner. The interaction between curatorial expertise with practical artistic thinking helps us develop meaninful and impactful exhibitions.
In the development of new materials the interaction between our festival team and artisans in different fields makes it possible to innovate novel exhibition practices. The interaction between our festival team, who are experts in the material needs and exhibition practices of photographic art, and the expertise in material of the artisans we work with, such as paper makers, allows us to develop novel materials or novel uses for existing materials in exhibiting visual art. This is reflected, for instance, in the use of recycled cotton paper for the 2023 festival.
In designing and building the festival constructions out of the reused waste materials from construction sites, our artistic director works with an expert carpenter. This interaction allows us to create surprising and practical ways of utilising waste material.
In developing our pedagogical program our festival team works with the festival pedagogue and pedagogues from partner institutions. The inclusion of pedagogical knowledge from certified professionals helps us to develop meaningful educational programs for local youth.
After the festival the festival team produces a catalog gathering all the circular economies solutions into a single place. This catalog is spread to a network of art institutions and collaborators throughout Europe and the world. This interaction between experts in the art field facilitated by the catalog allows our solutions to be spread to other contexts and get adopted into the production of other similar productions.
Most art festivals today, especially festivals displaying photographic art, talk about sustainability. Yet this is rarely carried along into their core production models for their working concepts. Sustainability typically means ordering more environmentally sustainable products from the same companies where materials are usually ordered or finding some recycled uses for a part of the materials after the festivals.
Utopias Lahti is the only european festival centered around photographic and visual art where sustainability and circular economies form the core of the festivals production model and act as starting points in thinking about the display of visual art. Utopias Lahti rejects art materials produced by large enterprises and takes back the ability to produce exhibition materials locally, from sustainable sources. Because there are no prior examples of a festival at this scale (that we know of), our production model requires us to rethink standard display methods and create novel solutions.
The production model also severs the traditional linkage of art as separate from its material form and materials working in the service of artists. In the festival, sustainable materials physically form the barriers for displaying and thinking about photographic and/or visual art. Often the production model for art exhibitions is that the materials serve as the tools of the artist, with the artist selecting their materials from a range of premium materials that require high energy intensity production. We hope our model will encourage other actors in the art field to take up the production model we have developed and would also act as inspiration for actors in other spheres of culture, business and service production to think of circular economies as not only a tool, but a starting point for production.
The festivals circular economies concept is designed with the idea that it can be easily replicated in other locations. The actors we work with, such as the local newspaper printing press and construction company, are universal installations that can be found in most medium sized european cities.
Also the environmentally friendly production methods we develop and employ, such as the development of uses for inkjet printable recycled cotton rag paper, are designed to require low input costs for production. Often they are made by hand by a single artisan, such as the cotton rag paper, and can be produced elsewhere with relatively little investment.
The festival concept is also designed from the ground up with replicability and the free flow of information in mind. After the 2023 instalment the festival team will gather and produce a catalog that presents the exhibitions and pedagogical program along with all the circular economies partners, methods and processes utilised in the production of the festival, with a simple guide on how similar solutions could be implemented elsewhere in Europe and the world. The role of the catalog is to provide a lasting capsule of knowledge from the event and make this knowledge produced during the production accessible to anyone. This is in line with the festivals stance on information as free and available in contrast to patented and commercialised. The festival catalog is spread for free to a network of art and cultural institutions all around Europe and can also be ordered from the festival website by paying the shipping costs.
According to the report ”The Imaginary Crisis (and how we might quicken social and public imagination)" by the Helsinki-based think tank Demos, a deficit in the social imagination of communities and societies that has grown during the last 40 years is a central obstacle in solving large contemporary issues, such as the climate crisis that we currently face. The Utopias Lahti concept aims to address this by presenting artistic production as an engine for social change. How can utopian visions of alternative futures influence us to act differently in the present and what might these utopias look, feel and sound like? How can artistic processes take part in struggles for change, create solidarity and act as platforms for collective information building, action and care? The program of the festival dares to think differently, builds new spaces for sharing knowledge, tools and solutions and encourages action in its visitors through meaningfully curated, impactful exhibitions.
Building sustainable futures demand us to act now. We must not only rethink our material usage and the types of materials we choose, but our whole relationship with material production. Globally the art field is a small consumer of materials, but acts as a hub for experimentation and novel ideas with the power to spread into wider spheres of civil society, like industry and public sectors. The festivals local circular economies based production model is practical, replicable and serves as a model for different actors, especially in the event sector, on how they can incorporate circular economy into their production model.
