The set of installation and public interventions deal with the industrial heritage of the Suvilahti post-industrial district and the neighbouring Hanasaari Power Plant, which is located near the Kalasatama area. With its closure in 2023 and the Finnish divestment from coal planned for 2029, the artist tries to cope with the area’s ambiguous past, from a peaceful fishing harbour, through an industrial marvel to an environmental nuisance. The artist also tries to address its future – a proposed cultural and residential area, still reeking of coal and cyanide.
Hanasaari Power Plant 1909 – 2023 focuses on the heritage of the power plant, located on the grounds of the Suvilahti festival venue. During its century-long operation, the power plant brought up to 20,000 tons of coal per week to the port for electricity supply via coal ships. The resulting mountain of coal has thus become a kind of nonument* to progress, and part of the Helsinki skyline. Fascination with the shrinking and further disappearance of the coal pile after the power plant’s closure has led the artist to a new work, where she attempts to preserve the intangible industrial heritage and grapple with the ambiguous past of the area: from a peaceful fishing port, through an industrial miracle, an environmental scourge, to a cultural and residential complex that is supposed to stand on soil that is still soaked in chemicals and cyanide.
*nonument: a neologism, coined from the English words “no” and “monument”, which illustrates an object or building that has become a non-monument of something, due to its past – planned to be monumental, but later on destined to a fate of decay.
The project continues the artist’s work in Artistic Digitization which connects new media artistic practices, digitization, and (intangible) cultural heritage. The goal is to preserve cultural, especially intangible, heritage with the help of already existing (or new) museum digital archives, interviews or 3D scanning, and to present it in a new way with the help of new technologies. The Artistic Digitization project deals with the preservation of cultural heritage, often industrial, in the age of digital media and offers the digitization of (intangible) cultural heritage as a mode of coping with the past.
The project’s post-production has been financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia through the JPR-IMU-2026 grant.
The open-air exhibition will be made up of several interventions, ranging from pictures, posters, small scale installations to projections in and around the Suvilahti area.
Saša Nemec, intermedia artist (b. 1986, Šempeter pri Gorici, Slovenia)
Her practice spans between the exploration of new technologies and the use of age-old techniques, from mending a loose button to creating garments with 3D scanning technology. She established her community and textile-based research through the Repair-a-thon (2016-2026) project, a recurring event held internationally, the purpose of which is to inform and engage the community about responsible consumption and repairing, and continued the research through the Threading (2018-) projects, which added a digital component to the research.
On the other side of her practice lies the research of the digital. The artist addresses our inability to transfer our conscience into the digital world through the project Inside/Outside (2017, 2020), while her interest has also shifted towards the practice of digitization of (intangible) cultural heritage through the works The Flickering Paths of Coal (2023, 2024), Mercurial Threads (2025), and Hanasaari Power Plant 1909-2023 (2024, 2026).
Her work has been presented, amongst others, at the: Helsinki Design Museo (Helsinki, 2018), Fashion Colloquium in Arnhem (Arnhem, 2018), Manifesta12 5x5x5 Events (Palermo, 2018), Manifesta12 Collateral Events (Palermo, 2018), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Celje, 2018), BIO|26 (Ljubljana, 2020), ICIA (Gothenburg and online, 2020), The Wrong Biennale (Self As Service, online, 2023), and GO!2025 Culture Capital (Gorizia/Nova Gorica, 2025).
She works and lives between Helsinki and her hometown, Nova Gorica.
