VALTIO + / RAKKAUSBUSSI #2

Rakkausbussi – Love Buzz

Ruisrock Festival, Ruissalo, Turku
5 – 7 July 2013

Artists: Henna Aho & Ville Laaksonen (aka Turu Väri)

Project description:

Rakkausbussi – Love Buzz was a large-scale participatory artwork and community performance conceived by Henna Aho and Ville Laaksonen for the Ruisrock Festival 2013, one of Europe’s oldest rock festivals. The project invited festival visitors to collectively transform a pink 1975 Volkswagen Kastenwagen into a public artwork celebrating love, peace, and shared authorship.

Parked in the middle of the festival grounds, the van became a living canvas. Over the three days, more than 500 participants were estimated to contribute, each adding drawings, messages, or love declarations directly onto the vehicle’s surface. The pristine exterior gradually filled with overlapping gestures of affection and humor, forming a layered communal manifesto of love. Every contribution was documented photographically and later archived online as a digital continuation of the work.

In addition to the participatory element, Aho and Laaksonen performed a durational performance titled “Car Peace,” inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Bed-In for Peace. For two hours each day, the artists occupied a bed built into the van’s rear compartment, drawing and reflecting together on the theme of love. This quiet protest against indifference and fragmentation echoed the pacifist ethos of Lennon and Ono while recontextualizing it for a contemporary festival environment — replacing media spectacle with human intimacy.

Rakkausbussi – Love Buzz fused the aesthetics of pop culture, protest, and social sculpture. It transformed an ordinary festival vehicle into a temporary autonomous zone — a place where strangers could meet, write, and dream together. The work combined nostalgia and optimism, mirroring the utopian ideals of the late 1960s while reframing them through contemporary participatory art practice.

The project foreshadowed later developments in Art Incubator’s curatorial philosophy: the merging of art, social engagement, and collective authorship as methods of shaping shared experiences and alternative cultural infrastructures.