INTER, Jurmo is a spatial listening architecture situated on the island of Jurmo in the outer Turku archipelago.

Its subtitle, Meri kuuntelee meissä, The Sea Listens within Us, names the work’s central movement: the sea is not approached as a distant landscape, but as a condition that shapes perception, memory, breath, and belonging.

From a bench near the chapel and cemetery, the listener enters a distributed field of human voices, silence, weather, and distance. Built from recordings made with inhabitants and others closely connected to the island, the work approaches listening as a shared structure between place, community, and the listener’s own attention.

The recordings took place over nine days in spring 2026. Thirty people and thirty microphones formed one shared recording field.

At a certain point during the gatherings, one question produced a particular kind of silence: what is the sound or phenomenon without which Jurmo would no longer be Jurmo?

This question became the conceptual foundation of the work.

Human, sea, and empathy.

In INTER, Jurmo, empathy is not an attempt to humanise the sea. It is a way of listening before defining.

The recorded voices speak from ordinary life: boats, soup, children, smoke, fish, phones, animals, work, weather, relatives, and what should not disappear. Some belong to people who live on the island. Some belong to those whose families return here. They are not asked to represent the sea.

Their voices form the human horizon of the island, while the sea enters through noise, darkness, breath, weather, and the space between words.

From the bench, the listener is invited to close their eyes and keep looking. The black field behind the eyelids becomes another surface of the sea. Breath and wave begin to share the same movement.

Here, empathy begins as a change in attention. The sea is not a landscape outside human life. It is a relation that shapes how people remember, fear, care, and belong.

The listener may feel outside the island, outside the community, outside what is being heard. That distance is not treated as a failure. It is allowed to become part of listening.

The installation is situated near the chapel and cemetery of Jurmo. The chapel is a social gathering point, a place people often come to when they arrive on the island. The bench facing the sea sits just outside it, secular, yet at the edge of a ritual place.

From here, the listener enters a field where several temporalities coexist: the continuity held in the cemetery, the movement of weather and sea, and the living voices of those connected to the island.

Beneath the bench, headphones carry a spoken narration that runs alongside the outdoor installation.

The work stays close to these conditions: the chapel, the cemetery, the bench, the sea, and the voices that move between them.

When the voices recede, the island remains: wind, sea, distance, open horizon.

Developed in collaboration with the John Nurminen Foundation as part of the Meren puolella programme. The collaboration has supported the island-based process through local connections, recordings with inhabitants and people closely connected to Jurmo, and a shared focus on the Baltic Sea as a living cultural and ecological environment.

Supported by the Visual Arts Display Grant from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland / Finnish Agency for Arts and Culture (TAIKE / KUVI).

Opening: 16 June 2026.

On view until September 2026.

Visiting Jurmo.

Jurmo can be reached by the m/s Utö commuter ferry from Pärnäs harbour in Nagu. The crossing takes approximately three hours and moves gradually from the inner archipelago toward the open sea.

Travel on the ferry is free of charge, but advance booking is required through the Finferries booking system.

Please check the current timetable and booking instructions before travelling.