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“Climate Clock” in Oulu Reckons With a Warming World

Northern Finland's new permanent art trail asks visitors to trade the tyranny of the clock for something closer to geologic time, and in doing so, to imagine what an alternate future might look like.

A small crowd gathered on the harbor at Kello, a fishing village in the municipality of Haukipudas, the anticipation building as the top of the hour drew near. At 10 o’clock sharp, a recording of the local fisherwoman Elina Halonen spoke a single word into the morning air: “Miehiään”—of their men. It was the latest installment of a reading of Pentti Saarikoski’s Finnish translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, broadcast from a sculpture on the harbor wall at a rate of one word an hour, a pace at which the whole epic will take 10 years to tell. It is a fitting way into “Climate Clock,” a permanent art trail spread across the Oulu region as part of Oulu’s year as European Capital of Culture 2026, which asks us to tune in to a slower, deeper sense of time than the one most of us carry around in our pockets.

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That same day, we sat down to a lunch of spinach soup and Karelian-style pies filled with rice porridge in a church hall in Ylikiiminki, a few hundred yards from one of the trail’s other works. It was a minor moment in a packed two-day itinerary, but it has stayed with me as a kind of encapsulation of the whole project: down-to-earth, made with and for the people who live there, and entirely uninterested in performing for an audience that might not even be paying attention (yet).

“Climate Clock” is among the flagship projects of Oulu2026, the year-long program marking Oulu’s status as European Capital of Culture. Oulu, a city of just over 200,000 people a little south of the Arctic Circle, is the urban heart of a region of 40 municipalities spanning roughly 30 percent of Finland’s land area—an area warming, according to the scientists involved, at around four times the global average. Curated by Alice Sharp, artistic director of the U.K. organization Invisible Dust, and produced by Claudia Woolgar, the project paired six Finnish and international artists with scientists working on the environmental questions most pressing to their assigned corner of the region, their works found at sites ranging from a Stone Age settlement to a highway underpass. A seventh work, made in collaboration with local communities, embraces the whole region.

A trail shaped by ice, clay and lichen

In Oulu’s........

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