Photography: Veikko Kähkönen
A wonderfully disgusting odour of fried fat is floating in the air. People are standing in a serpentine line on Eerikinkatu street, downtown Helsinki. A basket filled with greasy delicacies has just come down from the first floor window, tied in a rope. A group of Japanese tourists are looking suspiciously at their paper plates with chocolate-glazed bacon and pie made of Mars chocolate bars. (more…)
Photography: Johannes Romppanen
Bicycle brunches, free concerts, independent art exhibitions, hammocks, swimming and night movies. This summer Kalasatama has proved to be the perfect location to spend warm days and nights in the city.
Last wednesday, the We Love Helsinki community celebrated a Bicycle Day in Kalasatama in an almost tropical summer night. The event, created together with a number of voluntary urban activists, started at Bermuda Helsinki’s container with live music, bicycle repair and brunch for a voluntary fee, freshly roasted coffee by Kaffa, drinks from the bicycle bar, and radler (traditional cyclists’ drink) from a bicycle tank by Pelago. At 10pm, over 300 cyclists started a night ride around the centre of Helsinki. The almost endless line of riders ringing their bells and curving through the streets was a spectacular sight. (more…)
Wild herb pizzas queuing for the oven in Kalasatama
Last Saturday 21 May was a historical day in Helsinki. For one day, anyone could start their own pop-up restaurant, anywhere, and regardless of what the rules say. The first ever Ravintolapäivä (Restaudant Day) was a carneval-like celebration in favour of richer food cultures and against rules that sometimes make food such a complicated question. Organised through a Facebook event, small and original restaurants popped up just for a few hours – on the streets, parks, clothing shops or homes, offering tapas, drinks, smoothies, popsicles and even fancy dinners served at home in the evening. (more…)
“What if we, ordinary people, could decide what kinds of messages we see on a bus stop, for a change”. This was the idea of Elissa Eriksson, art education student who became tired of the overload of commercial messages in public space. Last December, she started a Facebook campaign, called “Haluan nähdä muutakin/ I want to see something else” to free some space from bus stop advertisements.
Elissa describes how her idea was born, last November: “I was waiting for a tram, thinking about my master’s thesis, which discusses the possibilities of ordinary people to participate legally in shaping their urban environment. Watching the advertisements at the tram stop, it occurred to me that you could comment on them from within the structures. I thought that I could possibly gather a group of friends to rent one tram stop.” (more…)
Photo: Aram Bartholl
Across New York City, a new kind of public but anonymous network is building up. The “Dead Drops” are USB connections jutting out of walls at different locations around the city. Anybody can plug into them and exchange information with people they don’t know. (more…)