A car park beneath Oulu is now a botanical afterlife

Kivisydän is a car park carved into the bedrock beneath the centre of Oulu, Finland. Through November 30, two of its halls hold a garden. The Kuutar Garden, Jakob Kudsk Steensen's new commission for the Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture program, rebuilds the University of Oulu's botanical garden, its seed vault, and its endangered plants as a living virtual ecosystem, projected where the cars usually go. The installation views Steensen posted this week are the first real look at it.

Steensen is the artist Killscreen keeps returning to because Steensen keeps returning to the engine: four years of ecological fieldwork in Northern Finland, photogrammetry, and worldbuilding in game engines, the same practice we dug into in our conversation about art, ecology, and the game engine this spring. The new work draws on conservation research around Hippuris tetraphylla, an endangered aquatic plant, and reconstructs the botanical garden's pyramid greenhouses in the virtual world. The title figure, Kuutar, comes out of Karelian-Finnish folklore by way of the Kalevala: a moon deity, sometimes described as a weaver of golden threads, recast here as what the e-flux announcement calls "an architect of memory."

A parking structure is the most car-brained space a city has, and this one now stores seeds instead. And the sound: the simulation's music comes from Danny L Harle, the PC Music producer behind some of the last decade's glossiest hyperpop, working with Lugh O'Neill.

Tickets run through November 30. We covered Steensen's Otherworlds just two weeks ago.