The World of Firefighting

Jussi Kivi (born 1958 in Helsinki) has up to now kept separate two of his roles in life: he is a visual artist by profession, but ever since he was a little boy, he has shown a passionate interest in the world of firefighting. His childhood home was in Helsinki near a fire station, his earliest aesthetic experience was of wailing fire engines rushing past.

The drama of speed and valour associated with firemen’s work made them the greatest heroes in the world in Jussi’s eyes. The young boy spent all the time he could at the station. The climax of the young boy’s “career” in the fire brigade came in 1971. A cousin of his grandmother was a fire chief in the small town of Warren in the United States, and he took the 11-year-old Jussi with him for a month to follow the work of real firefighters around the clock. Jussi also carried a cheap camera with him.

In the late 1980s, when the fire brigade was just a gilded childhood memory, the snapshots he had taken in America and the toy fire engines he had played with as a child began haunting him again. Nostalgia developed into a passion, a mania for collecting everything that had to do with fire brigades.

The result was a collection whose earliest items were drawings of firefighting made by Jussi at the age of five that his mother had kept, and his father’s photos of the young boy playing with toy cars and wearing a fireman’s helmet. Friends who knew about his passion helped Kivi increase his collection. First the collection filled just a clothes closet in his flat, but since then it has taken up more and more space wherever he has moved. The last place he kept it, the back of his studio, was filled from floor to ceiling.

Finally the space was needed to store his artworks and their transportation crates, so the fire brigade collection – that “childhood haven beyond the reach of the art world and its conflicts” – had to be packed in banana crates. Jussi decided to grow up, and prepared to give up the collection.

But in spring 2008 an unexpected turn of events occurred. As an artist member of the Romantic Geographic Society, Jussi ended up on an expedition with his friends in an old, Soviet underground nuclear bomb shelter in eastern Estonia, abandoned when the country had gained independence. Scattered on the walls and floors of the former training bunker was a huge amount of partly moldy Soviet information boards and posters presenting civil defense and fire fighting procedures before and after the nuclear fallout.

The romantic adventurers rescued some of the material and, by force of the inevitable, Jussi’s fire museum came to a new level. Now the relationship between firefighting and art was realigned: personal nostalgia was transformed to communicate new meanings. Childhood adoration for rescuers was mirrored against a kind of threat of total destruction for which artifacts of heroism, or underground bunkers, can no longer provide protection.

Marketta Seppälä
Director, The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange