a shocking delusion of nonsense
writing about my time at Haihatus artist residency in Joutsa, Finland
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When I told people where I was headed for three months in the summer of 2017, they always asked twice. Joutsa? Really? Keep in mind these were not just coworkers and peers back in Brooklyn, but people who had called Finland home their entire lives. The genuine confusion on their faces awakened the nerves I had, to that point, so deftly avoided. What could you possibly be doing in Joutsa?
These were exactly the questions Merja Metsänen and Raimo Auvinen were asked when they left the city to start an artist residency in a small municipality in the middle of Finland. Their friends and family thought the whole idea was haihatus — a word that roughly translates from Finnish as “a shocking delusion of nonsense.” Aptly, they took that word and put it right on the front door, and their residency was born.
Haihatus began in 1999 at an old schoolhouse in Hartola, then moved the following year to the premises of a former hospital on the edge of the Joutsa municipality, where it lives to this day. Set across ten acres of land, three buildings, a garden, an outdoor sculpture park, it sits surrounded by a gradient of forest, lakes, and meadows. Merja was a whip smart visual artist, illustrator, cartoonist, and writer, grey-haired and smiling when I met her. She explained that the driving force behind Haihatus was to spark the emotion of the passerby. As an artist, she believed that art and its free practice were a value in themselves.
She and Raimo became a foster family for children with special needs, adopting approximately twenty kids over the course of ten years. And they opened their arms to hundreds of artists from around the world. The idea of haihatus, it turned out, was not just a naming device, it was a tenant to live by.
A regular day at Haihatus started with a strong cup of coffee — Finns are quick to tell you they drink more coffee per capita than any other people on earth. You'd check the daily handwritten journal on the counter to see if there were any activities planned or excess food dropped off by local restaurants. Then into the shared studio through the morning. Whenever you wanted, you could take a bike downtown to jump in the lake, or walk through the blueberry and birch forests, picking fresh mushrooms or finding chaga that had fallen from the top of a tree. The evening consisted of communal activities, a sauna together, a fire in the backyard, watching a film, cycling through the empty streets of Joutsa under a sky that never quite went dark.
I once asked Merja what the forest was called; the one surrounding the residency, the one you could walk into and feel gently consumed by. Coming from California, I was used to demarcations: Redwood National Forest, Angeles National Park, names that let you know you'd entered somewhere protected and designated. She looked at me, at first a little confused. Then she laughed and gave me a warm response, “It's just the forest. It's all just the forest. It doesn't have a name.”
I was there longer than anyone else that year, long enough to watch the cast of residents change around me, and to understand that Merja and Raimo had a gift for drawing a particular kind of person to that particular patch of forest. Belle arrived like a beam of warmth and never dimmed. Emma was a sardonic nature punk from the Pacific Northwest whose art aimed to close the distance between cities and the natural world. Cara, an Irish artist, made work so thoughtful and delicate it seemed to hold its breath. Troy, a Texan, painted visions so otherworldly you wondered what frequency he was receiving them on. I watched Mika from Japan make her own paper from grasses she gathered on the property, turning the land itself into her medium. Milka, a Finnish art student, was gathering work experience and became our friendly Finnish dictionary. And Helen, a South Korean artist, was quietly navigating what it meant to make art as a profession outside of Korea, in a place where no one was asking her to justify it.
None of us had any real reason to find each other. We came from different countries, different practices, different ideas about what art was even for. What we shared was that we had all, in our own way, followed an impulse that the people around us found hard to understand. We had all said yes to Joutsa.
The summer after I left, Merja passed away from aggressive brain cancer just under four months after a tumor was discovered. Raimo followed her a few months after that. Walking the trails in the central Finnish wilderness, there are no maps, no markers. But there are slabs of wood, two by two, leading you into the trees. For so many of us, Merja and Raimo were those pieces of wood guiding people through a nameless forest, asking nothing more than that you get a little lost on the way.
I'm still in touch with the people I met there. We live scattered across the world now, making our different kinds of work, carrying on. We don't often speak explicitly about what Haihatus gave us, but we don't need to. I think each of us took something from the way Merja and Raimo moved through the world: the belief that the haihatus impulse, the delusion of nonsense, is worth following. That the forest doesn't need a name to be worth walking into, it simply needs to spark the emotion of the passerby.
