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