As a teenager, my professional aspirations fluctuated: one day I imagined studying to become an ornithologist, geologist or paleontologist, on another I would be interested in languages, and at the beginning of upper-secondary school it was architecture. In my family visual art had always present in some way, right back to my great uncle Eetu Isto’s generation, and my earliest memories of our summer home in Vojakkala, in the municipality of Tornio, are of my great grandfather’s prints of masterpieces of Finnish and world art: as a child I could gaze at Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Through my father, who was a master builder and teacher at vocational school, building, architecture and the environment also started to interest me.

During my career I have been able to work in varied tasks in the museum sector, also in very different kinds of museums. My own museum sector ‘vocational college’ was Hanko Museum, where I went to make an inventory of town buildings while still a university student in the mid-1980s. In a small museum with few employees, one had to do all kinds of things from writing articles, editing publications and printing to planning exhibitions and cutting mounts. My next place, Espoo City Museum, was significantly larger and the tasks more specialised.

I have been given the opportunity to participate in the development of the museum sector through different organisations and through various positions of responsibility. Of these, the most important has undoubtedly been a six-year term on the board of the Finnish Museums Association, which offered a genuine view over the broad and heterogeneous field of Finnish museums and the possibility to influence legislation, the promotion of the interests of other museums and continuing education in the sector alike. I was also able to participate in the construction of the first assessment model for the museum sector.

I was well aware of the huge challenges I faced after being appointed director of the Helsinki City Museum in 2003. The storage of large collections and other questions of collection policy were the first things waiting on my desk to be solved, and ten years has been spent dealing with them. Navigating in an ever faster paced and unpredictable operating environment, digitalisation and the public availability of information, answering citizens’ needs for involvement and the shrinking of the public purse are everyday themes in the work of a museum director. They have also radically changed museum work.

My memories of my early student days include Professor Lars Pettersson’s legendary lectures on mediaeval churches and castles, in which he traced in the manner of a detective the secrets of the shields in Hattula’s church paintings, or the openings in the towers of Vyborg Castle on the basis of descriptions of a huge explosion known as the Vyborg blast. For a young novice, the professor’s methods, meticulously based on source research, and his sometimes exceptionally creative and hilarious interpretations, demonstrated what science at its best could be – exciting and fun!

I am already dreaming of next spring, when we will open the new city museum on the corner of Senate Square. I see the museum as a meeting place where everyone will have the chance to discover exhibitions, events and courtyards, and where there will the chance to be surprised, have fun and for everyone to find their own Helsinki.