3 months in finland

writing about my time at Haihatus artist residency in Joutsa, Finland

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When I told people in Helsinki where I was headed, they always asked twice. Joutsa? Really? Keep in mind these were people who had called Finland home their entire lives. The genuine confusion on their face awaked my nerves that to that point, I had so deftly avoided. What could you possibly do in Joutsa?

That was exactly the question Merja Metsänen and Raimo Auvinen were asked twenty years ago 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 to a shocking delusion of nonsense. Aptly, they took that word and put it right on the on the front door, and a residency was born.

This idea of haihatus quickly became a tenant to live by for Merja and Raimo. They bought an old hospice house in a rural municipality. They adopted twenty kids with special needs over the course of 10 years. And they opened their arms to hundreds of artists from around the world. I was lucky enough to spend three months there in 2017 — longer than anyone else that year — and the mark it left of me is still very much imprinted on my worldview.

There’s an old Finnish joke I learned that goes as follows.

An older Finnish man sit at the kitchen table with his morning coffee, his face buried in the daily newspaper. His wife of 30+ years comes into the room and taps her foot with out his acknowledgment. Finally, she takes the paper and pushes it down out from his face and proclaims. “Hey, look at me, why don’t you tell me that you love me anymore?” The Finnish man sets down the newspaper, barely cracks a smile, takes a sip of coffee, and flatly responds, “I told you once, if anything changes, I’ll certainly let you know.”

There's an assumption about Finnish people — that they're cold, reserved, hard to reach. That's not neccesarily what I took from a joke like this. What I found was an understanding that excess is unnecessary; there’s a cultural preference for meaning over noise. I think that results in a deep humility. It feels like an acceptance of the way things are, not in a pessamistic way, but in a way that drives a foundation of happiness that perhaps more material cultures lack. Perhaps that’s why Finland has been ranked the “Happiest Country in the world for nine straight years, according to the World Happiness Report.

At Haihatus, all these qualities are bent into something a touch wilder. They take advantage of their own happiness, a cushion of comfort to fall on, Here, they wanted you to build a structure so tall it collapses. They wanted the forest to swallow you whole.

Every few weeks, a drumming group called Rhythm would come through. I could hear them from across the property — sound traveling through the walls and sparse birch trees. I'd been playing drums since fifth grade, starting on an electric blue kit, so I figured I'd understand what I was hearing. I didn't. My brain kept reaching for the meter, hunting for the beat, and there wasn't one. Just drums, moving at no tempo, following no rule. To someone trying to make sense of it, it was maddening. That was, I think, the whole idea. Letting go of the sense was what made it fun for them.

Merja pushed me to join the circle. I picked up a drum and, at first, I kept searching for a place to land, a rhythm to fall into. And then I stopped. I just hit the drum the way it felt. Afterward, someone smiled and handed me a pin with a big ‘R’ on it. Honorary member. It wasn't for anyone else. It was just theirs, and now a small piece of it was mine.

I once asked what the forest was called — the one surrounding the residency, the one you could walk into and feel gently consumed by. The person I asked laughed, gave me a warm pat on the shoulder. It's just the forest. It's all just the forest. Finland is seventy-three percent trees. Naming them would be like naming the air.

Walking the trails at Haihatus, there are no maps, no markers. Just slabs of wood, two by two, leading you into the trees. 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.

Getting lost is good. Don't follow the rhythm. Take a breath. Let the forest have you for a while. In the middle of nowhere Finland, nonsense turns out to be exactly the medicine you need.