“It feels like I’m in an alternate reality”, my friend says. We are standing on a cold pitch-dark beach, only inches away from the water. In front of us is the pier, adorned with screens showing old ABBA videos while a DJ set plays ethereal electronica. With the sky and the forest stretching above us, it almost feels like the pine trees and the stars hum along. Welcome to the Superwood Festival.
Superwood, a brainchild of fashion company Ivana Helsinki, held at a hotel in Eastern Helsinki, is a brand new concept in the Finnish festival scene. What the event promised was a 2-day festival with its program brimming with activities: music performances, academic talks, movies (all-Finnish!), food (all-vegetarian!) and art tours (with the artists themselves as your guide!). Still, walking in, you had no idea what to expect. The festival was shrouded in mystery from the get-go – even finding out about the whole shebang was like playing six degrees of separation, you kind of heard about it from a friend who heard it from a friend whose boyfriend is, maybe, playing there.
Usually, the hype should not be believed, but Superwood delivered.
The venue was certainly unique. Hotel Rantapuisto is a modernist pavilion from the 60s, surrounded by spruce and pine, and visitors were given the chance to stay overnight at the hotel for the duration of the festival. It’s the most perfect grown-up sleepover fantasy: spend a weekend with your friends partying, watching movies, swimming in the sea, popping into the sauna, bumping into other too-cool-for-their-own-good people, and enjoying music. The lineup was definitely a Who’s Who of the Finnish music scene today, including both up-and-coming and well-established names. The catch was that the visitors got to see them play in more obscure venues such as auditoriums, banquet halls, the sauna, at a campfire, the hotel rooftop, and, of course, the woods.
Indeed, the cherry on top was the Wood Tour, a 2.5 hour guided after-dark walk in the forest seeing 10 artists play short sets. As suspected, the performances were very much not business as usual. Stumbling in the murky woods with the flashlight disco lights leading the way from performance to performance was an absurd experience – in the very best sense. The artists came through as well, whether it was ambient electronic or acoustic singer-songwriter sets, and made use of this unusual backdrop. To wax poetic, lights danced on the spruce needles and the surrounding foliage echoed the sounds. The weather gods were on the organisers’ side, too, as after a solid week of rain it managed to be a clear, cold night.
Inside and outside, the atmosphere proved to be Twin Peaks-y, to say the least. There was a mysterious, excitement-inducing vibe that anything could be behind the next corner. Indeed, Superwood gave its visitors space to roam and to discover – although for some, this translated to frustration at the lack of directions (“What’s going on? Where should I go now?”). Visitors felt more like a part of the experience than mere spectators as they found rooms with photobooths, Finnish design pieces, lounges, and shady corners to chill with your GT in hand. (Bubbling under, or other things I sadly missed, but heard about: our Green presidential candidate playing a DJ gig, secret gigs on the beach, a famous poet cancelling his performance due to a “sudden and surprising hangover”, and a pop-up speakeasy bar.)
However, Friday suffered from some minor first-time festival logistics slips. People who weren’t willing to splurge 29€ on the restaurant menu managed to find only two food trucks outside which, according to rumours on hotel hallways, both ran out of food around 11 p.m. Moreover, the Wood Tour understandably was a popular attraction, and the performances were sometimes scaled too small for the crowds. If you were left at the back of the pack, there was little chance to actually see anything. Hopefully next year’s festival will supply the demand with more tours.
Despite little lapses, Superwood managed to turn the idea that festivals can only be celebrated during summers upside down. There was something distinctly Finnish and Nordic about the whole experience. We spend most of the year in darkness, so why not let it set the mood – just not in a gloomy, depressing way? The darkness and the silence of the forest are true Finnish essentials, and Superwood harnessed the ambience of the surrounding elements to its advantage.
So, it feels like Superwood dug its roots firmly into the Finnish festival scene. What an eerie and elegant start to which we hope will grow to be a continuing autumn tradition.