The Kuutar Garden: a virtual world of botanical afterlife

Presented in the underground Kivisydän car park beneath Oulu city centre, the installation draws on more than four years of ecological fieldwork in Northern Finland. Since 2023, Steensen has worked in Oulu and its surroundings, where the Botanical Garden and Oulu’s distinctive northern light — especially moonlight — have become central influences.

The work draws on plant collections, seed archives and conservation research, including the endangered aquatic plant Hippuris tetraphylla. Part of Steensen’s process includes a virtual replica of iconic Oulu Botanical Garden pyramids, which houses fragments and stories from many decades of botanical research for audiences to discover.

Visitors encounter an immersive environment inspired by one of the world’s northernmost botanical gardens, with the simulated world’s corresponding musical elements made in collaboration with Danny L Harle, and Lugh O’Neill.  The underground space is reimagined as a spectral garden, and visitors move from one plant screen to another and across a synchronised soundscape.

Kuutar – an architect of memory

The title refers to Kuutar, a female figure from Karelian-Finnish and Baltic-Finnish folklore, known through the Kalevala and Kanteletar. Associated with the moon, nature, and cycles of life, and sometimes described as a weaver of golden threads, Kuutar connects themes of creation, continuity and transformation.

In Steensen’s interpretation, she becomes an architect of memory: part seed bank, part archive, part speculative ecosystem. 

“The afterlife is a space of new worlds, not just the dying of the old,” says Steensen.

These encounters form a virtual ecosystem where plants act as messengers between past and future, science and mythology.

Read more about the exhibition and Jakob Kudsk Steensen from Oulu2026 programme page