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Event
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The Experience of "the Quietness"
As far as the eye could reach, the world was lying totally covered with powder snow, and a silence indeed fell over it. I stood still with holding my breath, while I was looking at snow alighting slowly like pile over a reindeer farm. The only sound I could hear was reindeers' stepping in front of me. Low and gentle sound of snow being pressed underneath the reindeers' feet. That was also only and same kind of sound I could hear in the middle of the night on the same day while I was looking up the sky for an aurora and the North Star.
Inari is located eight hundred kilometers north of Helsinki, about an hour driving from Ivalo airport. We visited a reindeer farm in snow covered plains.
 On February 25 at Lume Center of the University of Art and Design Helsinki, the third Japan Finland Design Symposium with the theme "the Quietness" was held. The tour to Lapland was also planned to see and experience Lappish culture nurtured in the region of the North Pole.
It was the tour to the area where people have succeeded generations of living by herding reindeers and catching salmons. Twenty one Finnish and Japanese members among participants of the symposium joined the tour.
The trace of people and a glacier ten thousand years ago. The glacier retreated along the Gulf Stream. / SIIDA Sami Museum and Northern Lapland Nature Center
Historical display of Lappish culture. 10th century ~ 16th century (partial) enlarge
 Looking up the sky for the light of an aurora and the North Star. Pitch-dark and little distance in the woods, a serow's slow moving from time to time could be felt.
Beyond the woods and hills running low on the horizon, the near full moon radiated dim and white light through clouds. After a while, when thin clouds like a haze split and we saw stars started twinkling, our expectations for the appearance of an aurora got around. And it appeared all of sudden. The pale green light faintly emerged in the soundless sky as if it was building a part of something in cone shape.
Its colors were varying from pale green to pale blue, and becoming white as it was gradually losing the colors, then turned into gray and disappeared into the sky. We were all attracted to just a second of its ephemeral performance. When we returned to ourselves, we felt as if being soaked in a resonance of somehow gracious and heavenly atmosphere. It was the precious experience that we could touch Finnish Quietness by ourselves.
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Secretariat
Japan Finland Design Association (Japan)
c/o The Finnish Institute in Japan
3-5-39 Minami Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan 106-8561
c/o GK Graphics Incorporated
telephone : 03-5952-6831 facsimile : 03-5952-6832
e-mail : jfda@gk-design.co.jp
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