Jaakko Myyri Gives the Birds Back Their Silo

AaltoSiilo Presents White Nights in Oulu, Finland

Jaakko Myyri curated White Nights at AaltoSiilo, the former cellulose silo designed by Alvar Aalto in Oulu and now being transformed into a cultural venue.

The exhibition brought together six artists, including Myyri, Jihyoung Han, and members of the South Korean Daeju Collective, whose works engaged with the building’s materials, technologies, and histories of labor.

Curatorial Text by Jaakko Myyri

White Nights is a site-specific exhibition shaped by the industrial architecture of AaltoSiilo, the first industrial building designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and today a former cellulose silo undergoing transformation into a cultural venue.

The exhibition approaches the building not only as an icon of early modernism but as a material archive and a repository of accumulated traces of labor, carried forward and reinterpreted through the participating artists’ works.

Here, industrial systems, technological infrastructures, and cultural rituals are approached as active environments in which human action encounters counterforces embedded within the site itself.

Through works exploring urban transformation and ecological relations within modernism’s material legacy, human perception no longer stands at the center but fractures within systems operating with increasing autonomy.

The artists approach AaltoSiilo as a living archive whose material, architectural, and social histories remain active in the present. Their works investigate memory embedded within materials, architectural traces, temporal transformations, oral histories of labor, and embodied practices. Together, they activate the building not as a backdrop, but as a collaborator whose layers of production, maintenance, abandonment, and renewal continue to generate new meanings.

Jaakko Myyri unveils the site-specific artwork Crow’s Feet, built from the original carbon steel recovered from AaltoSiilo. Beginning with the former woodchip hopper of the building, fragments of its steel plates are transformed into sculptural bird feathers that float within the space once occupied by the original structure.

Crow’s Feet preserves an architectural trace of AaltoSiilo’s industrial function while introducing a non-human perspective into the building’s history, foregrounding the period after the factory’s closure when human activity receded and local avian life came to inhabit the abandoned structure.

The feather-like forms allude to the geometry of the hopper, tracing the shifting temporal relationship between human and non-human agencies across the landscape of industrial modernism.

In Myyri’s Dweller Model, the silo becomes an active technological environment where audiences encounter an auditory system operating in a state of full automated governance. Through AaltoSiilo’s unique acoustics, visitors communicate with a conversational AI trained on climate prediction data.

The large language model behind the voice predicts future climate events and scenarios of technological displacement, linking the site’s industrial legacy to questions of the automation of knowledge production and diminishing human agency.

His installation Slack Storage similarly examines the hidden infrastructures of contemporary life, relocating human embodiment into autonomous technical systems whose skeletal forms echo both server architecture and industrial machinery.Jihyoung Han’s Nostalgia Bunker depicts a transitional state in which the old world has disappeared and the new has not yet fully emerged.

Jihyoung Han’s Nostalgia Bunker depicts a transitional state in which the old world has disappeared and the new has not yet fully emerged. The work presents a public telephone booth referencing the collapse of social structures such as the state, corporations, and the nuclear family. Its graffiti- and sticker-covered exterior represents resistance to neoliberal spatial control, as well as the self-organization of marginal communities and the redefinition of identities.

Members of the South Korean Daeju Collective—Dan Kim, Juae Park, Jin Hong, and Grim Park—approach AaltoSiilo through practices exploring cultural boundaries, identity, ritual, and collective forms of making. Working across painting, installation, video, and spatial interventions, the collective investigates social structures formed within urban spaces and craft communities.

At AaltoSiilo, these approaches engage with material transformation, labor, and collective memory.

Grim Park’s silk painting MSQ50616 considers the relationship between historical traditions and the present through ritual practice, bringing Buddhist art, queer identity, human relationships, and personal histories into dialogue.

Dan Kim’s Residues of the White Nights reassembles discarded objects, broken ceramics, and fragments of previous works, reflecting on breakdown, reinterpretation, and the renewed meaning that can emerge from material remains.

A second trajectory within the collective’s practice focuses on rebuilding through embodied knowledge, memory, and continuation.

Juae Park’s Breast That Never Nursed explores cycles of construction and dismantling through the repeated building and undoing of a temporary shelter inside AaltoSiilo.

Beginning with the female body, the work reflects on care, survival, and the will to begin again despite inevitable collapse.

Jin Hong’s video work Being Here, Again extends this investigation into the oral histories of workers who once inhabited the building through labor, translating these memories into bodily movements that inhabit the tension between past and present. Together, the works reveal forms of knowledge that persist beyond the physical structures of the site.

Together, White Nights proposes the silo not as a preserved relic of modernism, but as an evolving ecology of materials, labor, technologies, and memories, where artistic practices uncover, activate, and extend the histories embedded within the building itself.

Text: Jaakko Myyri

Architectural research: Kaisa Karvinen

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