The Kuutar Garden (2026) weaves plant life under the artificial growth lamps of a digital botanical space. Artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen opens an underground world that explores a more-than-human afterlife. Featuring a virtual replica of one of the world’s northernmost botanical gardens in subarctic Oulu, the immersive installation transports the visitor into an otherworldly space, where the sun might have disappeared, but artificial moons illuminate the darkness and the ghostly plant life.

The title of the work draws from Kanteletar, the compilation of poems based on oral folklore. Kuutar, the Goddess of the Moon, is reimagined as an architecture of plant life: an ancient seed bank, a natural history archive, and a future afterlife.

Curatorial text by Jussi Parikka →

“Besides the visual architecture, the visitor is immersed in a mesmerising sonic world. Inspired by themes and structures of Finnish tango, the soundscape connects inner worlds and outer landscapes. The afterlife is a space of new worlds, not just the dying of the old.“

– Jussi Parikka

Steensen created the work during a four-year period, including dark cold winters that contrasted with the artificial light environments inside the botanic architecture in Oulu. The virtual world is a product of his embodied journeys through the botanic space, but also of stories resurrected from the local seed bank and the natural history archive. 

The visits included careful observation and documentation of the space and the plants as well as interviews with the local scientists. The fieldwork led Steensen to the conservation efforts of an endangered aquatic plant, Hippuris tetraphylla, as well as other plant stories which feature in the installation as instances of an afterlife. The Garden of Kuutar is materially embedded in such encounters, anecdotes, and experiences of plants and the scientists caring for them. The plants are spectral messengers between worlds.

Besides the visual architecture, the visitor is immersed in a mesmerising sonic world. Inspired by themes and structures of Finnish tango, the soundscape connects inner worlds and outer landscapes. The afterlife is a space of new worlds, not just the dying of the old.

The Kuutar Garden was commissioned by Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture, programmed by Claudia Woolgar (NL). In 2027, it will be presented as a site-specific installation at Mudam in Luxembourg and at the Helsinki Biennial, curated by Arja Miller and Mami Kataoka.

“The artwork is experienced as an entire immersive landscape, with projects, sound, and a custom-designed architectural transformation that mimics structures of the actual botanical garden that I visited and digitized to make the artwork come to life… As a result, it feels like you enter a massive ghost-like seed vault beneath the city itself.”

Jakob Kudsk Steensen in Flaunt