Meet Lapinlahti people: artist Sanna Saastamoinen-Barrois

I needed a workshop in the city in addition to my atelier in Nuuksio, and a good friend gave a tip about a free space in Lapinlahti. Now I’ve had a studio in Aleksis Kivi corridor since January. I love Virginia Woolf’s book “A Room of One’s Own”, and to me, my studio is a holy space meant just for me, where I am an artist; not a mother, a wife, or anything else. Just me.

One freezing, February day last year, I walked into Kivi’s room: the light was so beautiful, I sat down on his bed, read the poetry book in the room, and looked out of the window at the snowy landscape, that reminded me of my childhood winters in Iisalmi. I was moved to tears by the beauty of the place.

I often walk here from home through Kamppi via Hietaniemi cemetery, which feels like a rite of a kind, when the ugliness of the city is replaced by beauty and I pass through a road along which a lot of artists have been buried.

I love buildings designed by Engel, and in Lapinlahti he has taken into account things like the direction of light and how it fills the corridors. Nowadays buildings are planned as very cost-efficient rectangles, and they fail to take into account that people feel better in spaces that have round and organic shapes. There are a lot of curves in Lapinlahti, and the inner courtyard garden is like a castle yard in Tuscany. I think everyone who visits here immediately understand the unique beauty and value of this place. This is a utopian paradise. It is especially important to protect places like these.

Sanna Saastamoinen-Barrois’s photographic landscape work ‘Kasken kierto’ can be seen until 30.8. in the Lapinlahti park, on Fahlanderin puistokuja. Sanna’s painting exhibition opens on Aleksis Kivi corridor at the end of August.

Photo and text: Paula Hynynen