There are cities that announce themselves with noise, and there are cities that reveal themselves by listening. Oulu belongs to the latter. It sits at a latitude where light becomes a form of philosophy, where winter teaches patience, and where the horizon asks more questions than it answers. It is, in other words, the kind of place where a European Capital of Culture can become something rarer than a festival: a meditation on who we are becoming.
What excites me about the year ahead is the sense that Oulu is not trying to distract us from the turbulence of our age, but to meet it with clarity. Europe is restless. Technology reshapes us faster than we can reshape ourselves. Climate shifts alter not only landscapes but the stories we tell about time. Yet here, in the North, one finds a stillness that is not passive but attentive, like a mind preparing for insight.
European Capital of Culture is often imagined as a sequence of events; in Oulu it feels closer to a long walk beside a river in fading light, when the familiar world briefly rearranges itself and you understand something you did not understand before. Culture becomes a way of paying attention, of recovering the thread between the intimate and the immense.
I am particularly drawn to how the programme invites us to listen to things usually beyond our hearing: to forests, to data, to the atmosphere, to the echoes of distant stars. This is not escapism. It is a reminder that the world is larger than our daily quarrels, and that meaning is found not by looking inward alone but by standing in relation to something vast.
What should readers anticipate in 2026? Not spectacle, though spectacle will occur. What matters is the shift beneath it: the sense that Oulu is offering a rehearsal for a future in which resilience is imaginative, not defensive; in which communities chart new forms of belonging; in which the North becomes a compass rather than a margin.
Oulu2026 will not tell Europe what to think. Instead, it offers a place to think from. And in a century that feels increasingly unsettled, that may be the most valuable cultural gesture of all.