From Tampere we took the Serlachius shuttle to Mänttä to visit the Art Festival,  the largest summer exhibition of Finnish contemporary art — our almost annual tradition since I don’t remember when, but it must have been before we moved to Singapore in 2008. This year’s theme was “On Being”, and to be honest I did not quite get it. Overall, the exhibition at Pekilo was probably the most boring and least interesting we have ever seen there.

Unlike in the previous years, the Serlachius Headquarters  hosted two interesting exhibitions. The first one was “Somewhere in Between” by Viljami Heinonen, many oil paintings featuring a character wearing a yellow raincoat.

The other exhibition was by the Below Zero 2025 Art Award winner Anssi Kasitonni. His short movies and animations, and other art work had quite an amateur touch but they were hilarious and uplifting, all you need to brighten your day.

We started the next day climbing to the Mäntänvuori Hill observation tower on the Lydia Wideman fitness stairs (total of 218 steps) — that was a tedious climb since some of the steps were rather high.  Wideman, born in the neighboring Vilppula,  was Finland’s first female Olympic gold medalist in cross-country skiing, and did a lot of training in the Mäntänvuori area.

The observation tower, built from 94 layers of logs, was completed in 2005 based on designs created in 1920 by W.G. Palmqvist, who also designed the church of Mänttä. We did not return on the stairs but took a longer trail back down, checking on our  way the Vuorenkirkko nature church.

Our last destination in Mänttä was the Museum Gösta and the exhibition by Anish Kapoor. His piece “Ancestor” (2026, mixed media and pigment) was actually less impressive than I expected. It was huge, but from what I had read ahead of time I got an impression that it would fill the whole room, which it did not. Probably the space it was in was really huge …

When we first went to grocery shopping we found out that the local supermarket had started using food delivery robots for customers‘ online orders. The same supermarket chain in Helsinki also used them.  It was fun to watch them in action and try to figure out what they “think” they were doing. One of the guys in this corner was just spinning aimlessly.