Project
Alusta is an open urban monument that highlights pluralism and the importance of free public discourse. The artist duo IC-98 established the monument on a site from which a bust and commemorative plaque of Lenin were removed in 2022. The removal was preceded by ongoing discussion – beginning even before the statue was erected in 1977 – concerning the monument’s location and legitimacy.
In the coming years, temporary artworks, known as Alusta editions, will be created for the pedestal either by invitation or open call. These artworks can be seen as proposals for monuments, contributions to the conversation about what has been, could be, or should be present on the site.
The base, which stands empty for most of the year, is as important as the changing artworks. This emptiness – in other words, a space full of potential – is a monument in itself: IC-98’s own gesture, a “zero edition” whose content is present through active absence. The empty base and pedestal open up a shared public space that invites reflection on the meaning, representation, and historical presence of monuments.
The Finnish word alusta refers here concretely to the physical structure created to support a monument. At the same time, it evokes meanings such as base, foundation, beginning, provisionality, and initiation – something from which to speak, build, erect or grow. Something unfinished, with the potential to change. As an empty site, Alusta is a monument to possibilities, hopes, plans, and all those unfinalised ideas that may – or may not – one day take shape.
Inevitably, questions arise: What was here before? And what can we learn from that history? The presence of the removed monument is what distinguishes Alusta from one of its inspirations, the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square.
The question of the removed work and its replacements is complex. On the one hand, Lenin – as a person, phenomenon, ideology or era – is not essential. One could just as easily substitute him with: demagogue, dictator, slave trader, the victor of the defeated, or simply a man on a hill. On the other hand, rather than erasing memory, we should return to these figures again and again and consider what they might signify as warnings. When authoritarian forces rise, when people are divided into “us” and “them”, when politics is practised through power rather than dialogue – we should come together around difficult figures of the past and ask: is this something we want to return?
IC-98
Patrik Söderlund & Visa Suonpää
Editions
Alusta 01 will be realised in spring 2026 by invitation. The selected artist will be announced in early 2026. In the years to follow, editions will be produced either by invitation or through open calls. The project currently has permission through 2027, but the aim is for Alusta to become a permanent part of Turku’s public art programme.
Between editions, for several months at a time, Alusta will remain empty. This empty – that is, full of potential – monument is IC-98’s own work, the starting point for the project. The content of Alusta 00 lies in its active absence, and in the ongoing conversation it sustains about what could or should be on the site. This conversation also touches on the core of politics: democracy is essentially an open and unfinished process, rather than a fixed and final solution.
History
The monument to V. I. Lenin at the top of Aurakatu on Puolalanmäki in Turku consisted of a bronze bust and commemorative plaque. The work was a gift from the city of Leningrad to its sister city in 1977. The monument was a visible symbol of the era of Finlandisation. It was not merely a memorial, but a tool of political messaging. The bust represented a system in which culture, art, and public space were subordinate to political strategy. The work reflected a cautious foreign policy climate, which required Finland to repeatedly perform rituals of friendliness towards the Soviet Union.
From the beginning, the monument attracted criticism. Turku’s Museum Centre has compiled a significant archive of documentation on acts of vandalism directed at the statue over the decades. The situation changed dramatically with the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The city decided to remove the monument in April 2022. The decision stated that “the bust itself poses no threat to anyone,” but “nonetheless represents a particularly undemocratic and tragic period in human history, and an ideology that does not align with the City of Turku’s core values and strategy, which emphasise forward-looking renewal and the equal rights of all people.”
Over the decades, the idea of removing the monument had been raised many times, sparking heated debate both for and against. Twenty-three years before its removal, Professor Luigi G. de Anna wrote polemically in Turun Sanomat (12 January 1999):
“Guest writer and chair of the Cultural Board, Voitto Ranne (National Coalition Party), dislikes Lenin (TS 10.1), or at least the idea of his statue in a public space; he proposes relocating it indoors, perhaps to a museum basement.
I don’t like Lenin either. I have opposed communism both politically and culturally my entire life. Still, the Lenin statue is better left where it is. It symbolises a time that is part not only of Turku’s but also Finland’s history, however good or bad that may be. Moving the statue elsewhere would be as foolish an act as erecting it was in the first place.
Whenever an empire or social order collapses, statues fall with it. Often the same people who erected them – politicians, mayors, city councillors – are the ones who want them gone when the political winds shift; perhaps believing they can erase all traces of their responsibility in the process.
The ancient Romans called this ”damnatio memoriae” – the condemnation of memory. Modern-day Turku residents need not do the same to Lenin’s statue.”
