Reflections on a Cathedral

Time flies and we are in mid-January. It’s incredible this is my first post in 2013.  It has been quite an extended festive season for us but now we can’t help but admit it came to an end on Sunday and there’s no longer any excuse. I must shape up.

Well, I haven’t been completely idle. I’ve been entertaining guests, doing a lot of knitting, mostly while watching movies, and attending a few cultural events such as the Lux Helsinki happening. It is an annual event letting the light loose for a few nights during the darkest season of the year.

This time 13 installations lit up downtown Helsinki over the first weekend in January. Despite the unfriendly weather – the temperature was only some -10°C (14°F) but the wind made it feel colder – we decided to drive the 45 minutes and take the chill. The event certainly was worth the uncomfort.

The most impressive of this year’s works was the 10-minute video installation projected nonstop onto the Helsinki Cathedral. The installation entitled ‘Emergence’ was designed by the German Casa Magica duo formed by Friedrich Förster and Sabine Weissinger. The work referred to the location of the Cathedral by the sea above the city (as can be seen from the photos on an earlier post of mine here) on a spot where the clouds could be imagined to merge with the foaming sea.

I have seen other video projections on the white neoclassical Cathedral above the Senate Square before but ‘Emergence’ may have been the most powerful combination of film and sound shown there ever. We hadn’t read any descriptions of the individual installations beforehand and felt it symbolized not only the emergence of the place we now call Helsinki but that of life on Earth altogether.

I couldn’t help filming it even though I have no practice whatsoever in shooting videos. Should you be interested in an amateur’s poor footage I’m planning to publish links to the two videos, my second and third ever, as soon as I’ve figured out where to upload them. I will let you know.

PS. The videos are now on YouTube: the longer version here and the shorter one showing a couple of minutes from the end here.