Ferry Spotting

In October 2025, Finferries, the Finnish state-owned operator of ferry services across coastal archipelagos and lakes, announced a renewal of its visual identity: the iconic yellow ferries will be repainted white and blue, as a follow-up of a 2017 transition from fossil fuel powered ferry engines to a hybrid model. In the press release, framed as a move toward “purity, modernity, and sustainable development,” the change aligns the fleet with national narratives of ecological transition and technological progress.

In May 2026, we—Paula, Ella, and Matti—arrived in Korpo in the Turku archipelago for a research residency at Archipelago Art Residency. The coexistence of yellow and blue-white ferries became central to our work: a moment of overlap where past and projected futures were simultaneously visible. We had arrived during a moment of transition. Through interviews with ferry operators and Finferries personnel, and by closely observing vessels in circulation, we observed the repainting process as a top-down gesture.

We argue that this colour shift operates as a form of state image production. The ferries—critical infrastructures that extend land into the sea and have carried cars, people and goods across the archipelago regularly since the 1950s—become moving surfaces onto which ideas of national clarity, responsibility, and environmental virtue are projected. At the same time, these visual claims obscure the material and political complexities of archipelagic life.

Grounded in Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking, the project examines the contradiction between the promise of total connectivity and the lived realities of partial access, dependence, and extraction. In the Turku archipelago, mobility is unevenly distributed and tightly governed. The archipelago is a fragmented system, relying on other islands and the mainland. Within this context, the repainting of ferries reads as an attempt to unify and stabilize a landscape that is inherently discontinuous.

Ferry Spotting is funded by the Nordic Culture Point and Svenska Kulturfonden. The artistic work will be exhibited at Prospekt Space in Copenhagen from October to December 2027.