Bubblegum wor(l)ds

Just the other day we were writing about the frictionless aspect of contemporary writing on this very blog. Were we not concerned about the way Helsinki’s own little village voice* bandies about language as if the national media were just sharing a bit of ephemeral fluff for clever kids to play with?

Serious architecture writers will, theoretically speaking at least, have their work cut out for them once Helsinki starts to develop its waterside, like Jätkäsaari below.

Architecture critics are not a massive professional group, particularly not in Finland, and many of them don’t earn their daily bread from what they write about buildings and urban design. Someone who apparently does rely on fees for articles researched and written is our old friend Arkkivahti, whose recent blog waxes angry as well as amusing on the injustices of a media system (she starts, unsurprisingly with said village rag*) that allows commercial interest (writing sponsored by construction firms) to trump journalistic values. She even has a go at Jorma Mukala, chief editor of the wonderful Ark-magazine, for admitting in the interview conducted by said village rag*, that it’s actually necessary to take up construction firms’ offers of overseas travel to learn about new architectural sites.

Someone who gets to travel in search of such sites is another old friend Jonathan Glancey. Writing about the Venice Architecture Biennale, his words eerily echo some of the themes we’ve been thinking about over here at Jees Helsinki Jees recently. Here are some fragments of his text in Building Design 18.05.2010.

“incomprehensible or ineffably banal …”  “For one baffled moment, I thought the show was being curated by Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard rather than the Pritzker Prize-winning Sanaa architect Kazuyo Sejima. Asked to explainthe 2010 show, Sejima says: “The idea is to help people relate to architecture, to help architecture torelate to people, and to help people relate to themselves.” Or, as Pollard herself would have put it: “Yeah, but no, but yeah…”

Then there’s the Italian pavilion’s exhibit, called:

“AILATI: Reflections from the Future”. Che? I mean, you what? The name, in case you didn’t get it, is “a play on words, a reversal of the country’s name that opens up a new reading of contemporary architecture in an original and sideways glance at objects, reality and designs.” Va bene! The first section of the show is called “Amnesia”. Mercifully, I’ve forgotten what the other two are.”

Finally, we learn of a bubble-gum factory. A highly recommended read folks.

* Helsingin Sanomat, daily established in 1889 under the name Päivälehti, current circulation about 400 000, readership closer to a million. People boycotting it or annoyed with it, unquantifiable.

Community activism or bilious resentment – a Helsinki example

It’s been an interesting day. The afternoon went in the crowded large lecture theatre of Porthania at the University of Helsinki. The crowds came to hear the great philosophical entertainer himself, Slavoj Zizek, who’d come here to launch a translation of his book, The Soft Revolution or Pehmeä Vallankumous.

I’d better not say too much about the book since I haven’t touched it let alone read it, though there were piles on sale at the lecture.

But a little bit to record the afternoon, which was interesting and, I believe, pertinent to the future of a city like Helsinki in particular. Zizek is, as far as I can work out, a maverick, a hugely productive writer on very complex things around psychoanalysis and German philosophy, a specialist on “popular” culture like Hitchcock’s films and a passionate political thinker. Oh, and a Christian. But an atheist one.

I thought philosophers prefer not to get involved in messy reality or politics. OK, there was that slogan from Karl Marx, that the point of philosophy wasn’t to understand the world but to change it, but as I understand it that baton was passed on to social scientists. Today Zizek suggested that perhaps at this particular point of time this slogan ought to be turned around. I think he was saying that the world is so complex and that people with left-wing progressive intentions so lost for good ideas, that it might not be a bad idea to focus less on changing the world and try harder to understand, interpret and give it symbolic meaning.

Symbols do move people.

Zizek started by talking about the way that the left wing parties, the usual friends of the exploited, have no longer much to offer to those who are now exploited (that’s very much my word). Instead, the right wing populist parties around the world have appropriated the language that was once there for the left, leaving a horrific potential for resentment and a not very nice future. Particularly when you take into account the other small issues of ecological and technological developments the world has to cope with as well – areas around which Zizek travelled with charm in his long talk, but not always with clear direction.

The reference to right wing populism touched a nerve. Just this morning I came across a horrible piece of internet-based right-wing populism sparked by an article in The Usual a couple of week-ends ago. It pondered how Helsinki could avoid the “white flight” that was seen ten, twenty years ago in certain other Nordic cities where anti-immigrant sentiment among locals made them move out of their neighbourhoods. The article was a bit light-weight, told you which neighbourhoods are violent, which ones not (in Sweden and Denmark too) and it only interviewed whites. The author also tugged shamelessly at emotive nationalist heartstrings and, by using words like “indigenous” and “pioneer” locals, gave added symbolic meaning to a not very enlightening story. The paper got quite a lot of negative feedback.

But the point of putting this on JHJ? Well, there’s the stigmatising of neighbourhoods through the media, and the bizarre way in which, for some people, “Eastern Helsinki” (including e.g. Jollas, right, and parts of Vantaa) has become a symbol of some unwanted but unstoppable social and cultural development in our cosmopolitan city (from which the speaker, resident elsewhere, feels at a safe distance).

And then this bilious text on the internet. Apart from the Perus Suomalaiset Party who are regarded by many as just a bunch of crazies (from Eastern Helsinki) and by others as a straightforward extreme right party, there are a few organisations who have made noises specifically about the fact that immigration needs to stop. On their websites these organisations say they are “ordinary” people who want to defend their communities and to talk sensibly about the problem of immigration. They use the word “maahanmuuttokriittinen” to convey their immigration-critical stance.

They have thousands and thousands of messages on threads a few days old so it’s not easy to figure out what they’re about or how many people are involved. In some they refer to Helsingin Sanomat disparagingly as “the toleranti” and in others tell stories of how they were robbed by swarthy types.

Then there are the “watchers”, websites dedicated to proving that these folks are racist.

So yes, Zizek, there needs to be some symbolic work in Helsinki to tell stories that don’t stigmatise, simplify, stereotype and hurt. You rambled on a bit, all over the place in fact, but it was fabulous to see the place full, sitting all over the steps and propping up the walls. And thanks to Voima (who organised this), Like, Into, Gaudeamus and all those other publishing houses who just keep on publishing sharp thinking, translated or in the original. Finnish.