Art For All Festival - UNDER-GROUND

Art Festival

Kaisaniemi Botanical Garden, Helsinki

Art For All ry

I co-founded Art For All ry along with a group of art students and alumni from Uniarts Helsinki and Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2020. The association brings together artists in the beginning of their careers, encouraging cross-artistic collaboration and promoting accessibility of art. The association hosts an annual art festival, where I have worked as a producer since 2021.

Art For All Festival 2022 took place in the Kaisaniemi Botanical Garden in downtown Helsinki. The garden houses the Natural History Museum's living collection of plants. The festival studied the dialogue between art and science as the artists collaborated with the garden's staff and the researchers of University of Helsinki. The festival was preceded by a week-long “garden residency” where the artists built up their work in a cross-artistic environment.

The Art for All Festival of 2022 reflected on soil as a model of coexistence and transformation. Soil is a compound body, in constant metamorphosis. Animals, plants, and other organisms contend for its resources, finding shelter and nourishment. Being porous to changes, soil collects waste and chemical pollution. It hosts hybrid, resilient and mutual ways of living, offering a model for communities that welcome the struggles of diversity and cohabitation. Through the theme UNDER-GROUND, inspired by soil, the festival imagined social ecologies and sustainable forms of living, as vegetal, earthy creatures, learning ways of living in-between nurture and trouble.

The festival broke the garden's greenhouses' record of over 1500 visitors per day.

I worked as the producer of the festival overseeing the practicalities, resources, funding, logistics, tech and leading the cross-disciplinary festival team. The role of the production is highlighted in the festival process as the event is transported every year to a new location that is not typical for exhibiting art. The festival production includes a great amount of negotiation, planning and building trust and good working relation ships with the partners providing the venue. This process makes the festival what it is and challenges the festival team to reinvent the event and find new ways of producing and exhibiting art.