encounters
Suvi Innilä
Programme Director, Turku 2011 Foundation
Culture Does Good …for Your Heart.
Turku’s year as the European Capital of Culture 2011 has truly been a year of encounters. Thousands of artists and people from 60 countries have exchanged thoughts and experiences while carrying out the year-long cultural programme for Turku 2011. Millions of people have experienced these thoughts and the artists’ creativity in the form of artworks, events and performances, and thus hopefully gained lasting memories and new viewpoints on life. Besides cooperation, the Turku 2011 encounters have also been surprising, border-crossing combinations of disparate elements, such as Kimmo Pohjonen’s production Accordion Wrestling, which brought together accordion music and wrestling. Or the circus performance Quantum, combining circus and quantum physics. In these projects the bolder the original collaboration, the stronger the outcome has been. Amid the large-scale experiences, 2011 has also seen thousands of smaller encounters, sometimes simply coincidental meetings between artists and passers-by. These small encounters have created great stories—some larger than life. One of these little encounters took place during the Eurocultured Festival, brought to Turku by the Manchester-based company Spearfish. A Spanish visual artist, Aryz, was working on a huge mural artwork in the centre of Turku. One morning, he heard a young woman greeting him from the foot of his cherry-picker crane. When he got down, the woman had disappeared. But attached to the cherry-picker was a balloon with a little note saying: “Hi. I live in the house next door and see this painting every time I look out of the window, and every time it makes me smile. Thank you!” Aryz was so touched by this note that he drew a little heart at the bottom of the mural painting to thank the mysterious young woman. Hopefully she will one day find out that the heart she sees every day from her window is meant especially for her. 62