This work was developed as a course project in the Ceramic Laboratory of the Contemporary Design Programme from February to April 2025. Perhaps older than anyone living in Otaniemi today, the century-old soil I encountered made me think of the spacecraft, Mariner 4’s gridded images of Mars from 1965. If those first close-up photographs marked the beginning of seeing the cosmos “remotely,” ⟪Local⟫ begins in the opposite way from the ground I stood on at Otakaari 15.
Using clay collected from the construction site of the new student housing, I translated the exposed cross-section into “pixels,” arranging handmade bricks to reconstruct the three-sided stratigraphy revealed during excavation.
The iron-rich Finnish clay led me to explore its kinship with Martian regolith. By adding hematite, limestone, magnesite, and rutile to simulate the chemistry of Martian surface soil, the material remains rooted in “here,” in Otaniemi. Through the soil brought to light by construction, the work folds the site’s accumulated memory and time into a piece that will live within a space for study and daily life.
