Kuninkaan kaupungissa was nominated for The Comics Finlandia Prize in 2025. The stories pictured in it also inspired a puppet animation produced by Katariina’s team in Prague and Finland.

In a chat with Lölä, Katariina and Tessa talk about censorship, hope, tradition and underground culture being a playful (and thus powerful) alternative to oppression.

Tessa: Katariina and I met through the comic book idea two years ago. That is when she approached me through my colleague Mikko Jylhä, a comics teacher in Liminka art school just like me, with whom every year we produce a comic book. Then we introduced the idea to the students. Katariina had the script ready for the animation movie, and it also became one for the comic.
Katariina’s animations usually involve one storyteller. In the comic we tried to bring in more voices so we could build more characters around the story and people who read it could feel connected to different characters. So we started our own scriptwriting, and then were emailing back and forth with Katariina. [Katariina laughs.]
Then Katariina brought Roma people here in Liminka, including a musician and chairwoman of the Museum of Roma culture, Hilja Grönfors who was guiding us through Roma culture. We were white mainstream Finnish people who got to do the ethnic minority story, so we needed to be quite sure of how to portray things, not just trust our gut feelings [smiles]. There are so many specific details in Roma culture, for example, in how to speak to elderly people in one’s family. We had just seven weeks, and we managed to do the comic within this timeframe!
Eighteen people were drawing the comic: our students, ourselves and our work interns.
We published the comic book on the Roma national day at Pyhäjoki vicarage and soon learnt that the book might be translated into Finnish Roma language and general European Roma language too, as well as into Czech. There is not so much literature in the Roma language, so it was very precious. We also had a couple of exhibitions dedicated to the topic of the comic and animation, and concerts with Hilja Grönfors. In the process of our collaboration Hilja was nominated as Finnish Academian of Arts, which is the highest nomination you can get if you are an artist in Finland, sort of an honorary doctorate.

Katariina: She is over 70, and going very strong!

Tessa: Working with two big geniuses – Katariina and Hilja – has been beyond anything I’ve ever done artistically. We make a comic book every year, and we´ve had great books before. But this one was hardcore in a great way. [Smiles.]

Katariina: As the topic is. It is very hard to start to cooperate within it. Art fields such as animation and comics are quite undiscovered in the Roma minority. When a well-known person in the community like Hilja takes a project under her wings, everybody else is reading and watching, with curiosity inspired by her.

Lölä: Now seems to be a very challenging context for the Roma people. On the one hand, they have to face stigma and racism, which has always been the case. On the other, to go through domestic violence cases hurting the community on the inside. Have you felt that art helps the community heal from those lasting traumas?

Katariina: Art definitely has helped to share stories. And it has helped collect many things which might seem small, but are big taboos. For example, dresses should be long – ankles should not be seen. Men shouldn’t have bare arms. Older people are addressed with very high respect. As well as children – with praise… We were guided through these things by Hilja’s sister Helena, an expert in Roma language.
Years ago I started interviewing Roma people who moved to Stockholm from Karelia in 1960s and 1970s. Their stories were very touching. Sweden was very open back in the days, everybody felt welcome. For an ordinary Roma family coming from very shabby villages and towns of Karelia, it was a very big thing to get an apartment with several rooms and electric light, as well as to be able to have school for the kids and work for the parents. Everything seemed to be going forward, the future started to finally happen.
Finland couldn’t offer that much to the poorer citizens. Eastern and Northern Finland are still quite empty after that big emigration. The traditional agricultural world was vanishing. It was a big challenge for the whole society.
Interviews captured memories of the Roma in that hard time, and these memories were mostly good: people felt they were needed in Sweden, and happy about being able to work and study. Roma organisations were founded in Sweden, and young Roma could learn organisation techniques and tactics. It was a big and a necessary change in many ways, providing the Roma community with a lot of self confidence through participation. Many of the people later went back to Finland, and the situation in Finland started to change for the better. Nowadays we can say that any Roma kid has a possibility to go to school.
The stories were capturing that change, and it was a great privilege to collect them. Some of the storytellers were over eighty years old, having participated in the described events as young parents. This is a very high age in the Roma community. Another big group of interviewees were of my generation, now in their sixties. From a very young age they remember this sensation: ”We are moving to Sweden! The world is opening to us.”
Collecting the stories lasted three years and was supported by Nordic Culture Point. These fantastic (yet real) stories inspired the animation and the comic.

Lölä: You have conducted dozens and dozens of interviews, and elderly people opened up to you. That doesn’t always happen easily. Sometimes the elderly prefer to keep stories to themselves, seeming to be saving us from knowing how much pain there is to go through ahead. [All laugh.] Have they also shared, with you, insights into what the driving force for the Roma community has been – what helped survive through sorrow, pain and challenges?

Katariina: Now the situation is quite sad as Sweden is losing the glory, it has changed a lot, and many Romas are moving back to Finland.

Tessa: Somewhat of the opposite process to the one we described in the comic. Fifty years ago the areas where the Roma went to were so inviting, today they are making people flee because of gang violence and problems.

Katariina: The driving force for the Roma community lies in the feeling of collective. It is still a very tight community – in both good and bad aspects of it. It does inform this big part of the communal identity – ”together we are strong”. And of course, music is an important force keeping the collective together. It is funny, because most of the lyrics are describing the wagon world, the one of horses and roads. However, the youngsters still sing those songs, although they are about agrarian Finland which doesn’t exist anymore. Those songs are beautiful and loved. In one form or another they are likely to be passed on through many generations to come.
Hilja Grönfors is one of the great influencers who is helping the community preserve these musical treasures. She has collected more than two hundred old songs so far, travelling with her old car in Karelia and the North, listening to old people singing, and handwriting lyrics and music into small notebooks.
Another very special tradition supporting the community and connecting people in it is lace crocheting. It has also been a source of economic wealth: after moving to bigger cities Roma men were losing work opportunities, and it was in the hands of women to earn money, lace always being a common way for it.
We have been collecting stories – and lace pieces. In Pyhäjoki we made a forty metre long lace bridge – a community art project together with the Roma and Finnish communities, mostly with elderly women, who crocheted lace and put them all together. We also exhibited this lace in Prague and Budapest. As the lace bridge is travelling through Europe, it is becoming bigger, and it will come back to Finland in 2026 when Oulu is the European capital of culture. I hope we can carry it to Pikisaari and put it on the bridge over the Oulu river.

Lölä: Have you witnessed differences working with the Roma community in Prague and here in Finland? Who is happier?

Katariina: The Roma language is doing better in the Czech Republic. Most of the young Roma people can still speak the language. In Finland the language is almost vanishing. Now is really a high time to do something about it. I hope our comic book and animation can be powerful tools in preserving the Roma language.
The lace project has been a part of the Museum of Roma culture activity. We also hope to continue to explore tradesmanship and collect handicrafts, like soft metal works and kitchen tools, aiming to save the memories of this tradition before it vanishes.
One interesting, still very underdocumented topic connected with the Finnish Roma community is the tradition of fortune telling. It was a very important way to earn extra money from the 1940s until early 1980s. It is almost a cliche in public folklore: a wise Roma lady looking at your hand. It was a very clever and sensitive psychological tool, almost like a short therapy, and farmers’ wives and factory girls alike definitely needed to open their heart to a stranger now and then.
Imagine a society in a Finnish countryside in the mid-twentieth century. No TV, not so many newspapers. People were living in isolation. Then Romas would visit, telling the news of bigger towns and telling a fortune – or rather leading a fortune. If they knew there was a young farmer’s boy looking for a wife, they would suggest sending a daughter there. Then they would come to the groom’s house ”fortune telling” that there is a nice bride coming. Clever” [Smiles.]
There was indeed a big psychological element in it. Wives of farmers could tell the Roma their sorrows, fears and ”sinful thoughts” they could not share with the neighbours. Roma visitors were neutral listeners, not being a part of that community.

Lölä: Visiting counselor. [All laugh.]

Katariina: Bringing a big relief.

Lölä: What about the white privileged part of the crew? [All laugh.] Who was working on drawings based on Roma stories and visualised all those beautiful characters?

Tessa: Most of the eighteen people working on the comic were Finnish. The story is fictionalised, but based on true stories. All the characters have real life prototypes, but they are shaped into fictional characters. Katariina was the one choosing the characters and how they act. We were in a grateful position of being guided by someone who made tons of documents and films about the Roma community.
Many of us realised that we have met prejudice which was informed by our white privilege. Working on a comic was a great space to be able to learn. When we presented the comic in a gallery in Prague, we were visited by the United Nations group – Roma people from North and South America. They were keen on asking: ”Who profits from this? Who said you can tell Roma people’s stories?” I had bought the ticket myself and nobody had any profit. We have been feeling privileged to tell those stories, but they are indeed Roma people’s stories. A friendly collaboration spirit was amongst us when we were gathering together to work on the book, feeling quite free from the outside world and politics.

Lölä: The creation of the comic book and some episodes of the animation happened in Liminka art school just half an hour drive south of Oulu. What is so special about this place?

Tessa: The school has been here for 130 years. It is one of the three old folk high schools in Finland, and the last surviving – the other two have already been butchered. The folk high school’s idea is to give every citizen an opportunity to be somewhere for a year, so they can educate themselves, and have a small grant from the government to do so. That is how they can gain more citizenship skills.
Liminka school started as an agricultural school and was turned into art school in the 1960s. Some departments started and closed, but fine arts has always been there. In addition to that we have had glass art, theatre and dance and all visual arts.
We have support from the Ministry of Education and Culture. The big plus of it is that the school still owns its houses here in Liminka. Many other schools in Finland have been selling their houses to get things done, and then they were losing them completely. The government fancies schools that can provide tuition so everybody can be like a machine. [Smiles.]
The comics department has been here in Liminka since 2000. It is the longest existing department. Many of the stars in Finnish comics are somehow connected to this place.
I came here ten years ago, substituting the founder of the comics department, and then I slowly took his place when he retired. I also have been co-teaching in the fine arts department, because it is my first profession, and in the department of performing arts, because I have drama education.

Lölä: How do you balance, Katariina, between Prague and Northern and Southern Finland?

Katariina: Every place of the triangular – Czech, Southern and Northern Finland – has a different vibe. In Prague we are very connected with the old puppet animation tradition. The tradition is so rooted in Czech mentality, so it is easy to do it there. We are followers of the Jiří Trnka tradition, doing puppets in a very conservative old-fashioned way, like he used to in 1940s. We never use the opening of the eyes or the lip sync. So we are the last of the Mohicans there, believing that a puppet has a soul even when it is not speaking. That is the thing I want to bring to Finland, where the puppet tradition is young.
I believe that Trnka’s style of puppet animation is one of the purest and most beautiful forms of puppet art in general, allowing a soul of puppet to magically emerge.

Tessa: This is something we have in common artistically: being dedicated to respecting the old ways, learning to do something by hand and taking time to do it. Other art schools have been giving up the old ways, for example sculpting with a live model. We have a nude model throughout the year for the art classes, so people all learn how to draw from that point of view. In art academies everything is becoming more computer-based, traditional skills of doing things are fading away. We also have, for example, bronze casting. And I know just a few places in Finland that keep bronze casting classes…

Lölä: Katariina, your work has been praised through decades and at the same time you had to go through a lot of challenges, like censorship. For example, the animation piece about Mannerheim caused an attack of homophobes…

Katariina [laughs]: That was not the only case indeed.

Lölä: Then you got banned from a project involving Russian state animation body Soyuzmultfilm, who did not allow you to adapt Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita – after having sold their soul to the Kremlin.

Katariina: Yes, this happened in 2014. I still have that project in my mind and hope that soon there will be a time to do it. [Smiles.]

Lölä: Fighting censorship is a bit like cleaning the dust – you can’t really make it once and for all. In the censored environment, to celebrate the freedom of expression one has to keep pushing through non-stop. What helps you push through – keep raising awareness on equality, anticapitalism, human rights, etc?

Katariina: It is funny how something can be forbidden and next moment – free to discuss, and how these things constantly change as the world does. I have seen so many radical changes!
When I was starting with animation, Czechoslovakia still existed as one of the socialistic republics of the former Eastern block. I came there from Finland, which in those days was in between the East and the West: it was not easy for a Finnish student to get into Czechoslovakia, but still possible.
It took one year for them to check everything, and finally I got to my studies. I had brought one book from Finland with me – it was a collection of stories by Franz Kafka.

Lölä: I was just about to ask what came first – Prague or Kafka.

Katariina: It was my first independent scenographic plan, so I took my Kafka book and joyfully started the first sketches which later became the animated Kafka trilogy Tales from the Attic. I had been working for a couple of weeks when I saw a letter in my mailbox: ”Friday at 2 o’clock come to the headmaster’s office.” I had a thought that they might be happy that I was working with Kafka, a Czech writer. [Smiles.]
When I came to the meeting, all the school authorities were there. I got a feeling that something was wrong, and I was right. ”Kafka is a bourgeois and decadent writer”, they said. ”He has no meaning in socialist Czechoslovakia.” Then they were saying that if I brought that kind of book with me from Finland and tried to smuggle ”that shit” into school, I would very soon be deported back to Finland where I could do ”whatever I want with this Kafka”. [All laugh.] ”You should do something with your Finnish fairytales, they are very nice”, they said.

Lölä: That sounds like Kafka!

Katariina: Indeed. I had put a horrible amount of energy into the project, I loved it. I returned to the classroom like a wet dog, feeling all down. But then somebody else called me for a meeting. It was my scenographic professor who called me. ”Here comes the last nail into my coffin”, I thought. He was an old man smoking a pipe. ”If you do this Kafka work, you do it here in my room. We will keep the door closed and never share it with anyone, but you will finish this work.” He supported me all through the process.
Next came the revolution. The whole school turned upside down. The teachers who didn’t appreciate me vanished totally. In no time I was able to continue with the Kafka story without having to hide. In fact, I felt people hunger for the Kafka adaptation. It had been banned for so long.
With time, another extremum happened with Kafka legacy. His image being (mis)used everywhere, put on every t-shirt and so on.

Lölä: I have one too! [All laugh.]

Katariina: I managed to finish the project just the right time, before Kafka became too official and popular. That experience showed me how fast things can change.
Later I was making many movies about this kind of changes. For example, Radio Dolores is a piece about The Spanish Civil War. One of the characters is my father, who grew up in an extremely strange world. Finland was together with Hitler, but people were against fascism. Some were able to travel to Spain and fight against Franco. It was a big secret. As a child at school, my father always had to be quiet. He was also very afraid.
At that time it was forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations. England was considered an enemy country, and jazz was referred to as extremely sinful and forbidden. Just imagine, that listening to jazz on a BBC channel was very dangerous in Finland in 1940s. And that is exactly what my father wanted to listen to.

Lölä: The same thing was happening to jazz in the Soviet Union. ”Today he listens to jazz, tomorrow he will sell his motherland”, one of the propaganda slogans read.

Katariina: Yes! But after the war jazz became so popular. Everything changed again.

Lölä: You still believe in this possibility of change, don’t you?

Katariina: That is what hope is. Even now, when I feel very desperate with the world situation, I strongly believe that after ten years we will look back, take a breath and realise that the bad things are over.

Tessa: You should have seen Katariina’s short animation about Putin to back this hope up. Putin pictured as a retired matador! Unfortunately, even now, in the 2020s the Finnish television is afraid to show it.

Lölä: Definitely something to watch!

Tessa: The Matador came to life during COVID time, when one could not get to a studio. Animation had to be done in one’s own apartment.

Katariina: And we didn’t have any scenographic materials – and didn’t mean to have. We used old cabin doors, took them all off and made decorations out of them – also out of old nails.

Lölä: How did the Matador-Putin emerge?

Katariina: I was spending time in Barcelona and a story came to my mind. My friend was showing me old bullfighting arenas which were all turned into extremely expensive malls, as the bullfights were forbidden. There were very many elderly matadors posing for tourists though.
Rich Russian-origin entrepreneurs have built a sort of a bubble on the coastal land there in Spain. Their consumption of water was quite huge, which was one of the reasons the locals got angry: those entrepreneurs were used to having big pools and not saving up on washing their big cars. There were also rumours that Putin had a dacha there, at least it was a big joke material in pubs.
As I was listening to these stories and jokes and seeing the elderly matadors, I started picturing Putin walking around and wanting to become a matador. [Laughter.]

Lölä: Something they are incredibly afraid of in Russia, laughing in the eyes of a dictator.

Tessa: I also have a story about Putin. It was a trip back in the days to Karelia with Oulu underground artists. I remember how awful the censorship was on the border. It took Russian officials half a day to go through a textile art work byt Tiina Pehkonen – a Finnish flag with words on it. On that trip I was doing burlesque and diary drawings. One of my diaries had ”put in” (and ”put out”) markings, and one of the robots was fucking ”put in”. Anti-gay legislation, ”gay propaganda law” was just passed in Russian parliament, and it was somewhat of a protest.
[According to Russian laws one can be fined and sent to jail just for stating that being gay is ok.]
The Karelian television came to shoot my burlesque piece. I had ”love” and ”freedom” written on my ass and tits. I knew they wouldn’t keep me in jail too long, because I am Finnish.

Lölä: Were you arrested in the end?

Tessa: No. But the ”Put in – put out” picture from my diary was stolen from the exhibition. That brought hope [all laugh]. Love and art give me hope, especially witty artists like Katariina.
Hope is not about art as a provocation. It comes with art which has deeper depths, like in Matador. That’s how you can belittle the strongest dictators, by showing how they are only humans after all. It’s powerful to pull them off the pedestal they have been building for themselves.

Lölä: It is said that dictators are most afraid of laughter – and being exposed as humans. When Stalin was dying, people were shocked to read his urine test results in the newspaper. He was human after all, they read between the lines and were impressed. And humans die.

Tessa: I feel inspired all the time and not fearing anything. Eleven of my students who contributed to the book continued the work on the animation. They are students, so they are not getting paid, but nobody is really getting paid in art these days. [All laugh.]

Lölä: Katariina, you have witnessed many ups and downs of the culture scene in Europe. Is it the worst moment now in Finland with all the financial cuts or are we complaining too much? There is Oulu2026 – European Capital of Culture project going on after all.

Katariina: I try to think long-term. Some of my colleagues remember well what happened in 1968 in Prague, when Soviet tanks rolled in. The best of the Czechoslovakian artists went underground, which was becoming more colourful, powerful and innovative – despite everyday hardships, censorship and economical problems. Half of the philosophers were sitting in jail, but it was still one of the most innovative times in Czech culture.
It was hard to go underground with animation, because it involves technology. But still in Trnka studio the animators managed to do allegorical films where the meaning was hidden under the disguise of fairy tales. Everybody understood the meaning, but censors didn’t touch the films.

Lölä: They wouldn’t understand.

Katariina: Exactly! I felt a similar vibe in Iran, in Teheran. It was already the Internet era, and censorship was strong everywhere. The students were fast, clever and had excellent Internet skills, so they were distributing my movies through their own networks, like The Maiden and the Soldier, which was never accepted by the Iranian official festival scene. We were even able to create script writing workshops.
I admire the courage and creativity of the young people in Iran. It reminded me of my student days in the underground of Czechoslovakia. It was almost like a game, going to secret exhibition openings, watching out whether the police was coming or not. But nobody was complaining that we didn’t have anything to say. We always had! Censorship could never lead to an artistic crisis.

Katariina: Brain evolution [laughs]. I was once travelling in India. Although I was never too fond of gurus, I ended up in a utopia town where I was showing my films. There were interesting characters there, philosophers fighting colonialism. One of the gurus believed that our brain has just started its evolution. He was very positive. We have just recently stood up and lost our tails, he reminded [smiles]. Now is the time to expand the brain!

Lölä: This does not seem very far away from reality, considering that only in the nineteenth century inquisition was cancelled, and washing hands was introduced in hospitals.

Katariina: Yes.

Tessa: I am not fond of talking about cultural politics. I don’t like to be portrayed that way, although it is indeed an important topic. I would say that it is important to have places like Liminka art school, where students and teachers work together as colleagues and age doesn’t matter. This allows for learning from each other without hierarchies. People can just be, without having to be ”productive citizens”. These kinds of literal and conceptual places can keep art and culture alive and feed the underground. We just need structures to keep these places going. Finnish politicians are now getting rid of such places very violently, cutting all the funds.
Bigger institutions are surviving, but we need the variety of creative opportunities to do things by hand, take time and be connected to each other. And of course we need a more equal funding system.
As to brain evolution, I have been teaching drawing from perception, which helps the brain enter a flow state of mind; and doing things with your hands activates certain parts of your brain. I hope it will be trending soon, especially as the world of AI is taking over drawing images.

Lölä: What is your biggest hope for the Roma community?

Katariina: That the language will survive. Roma art has been quite predominated by music, but it is so much more! Lace has been a big project, carrying a lot of history, as every family has its own style of crocheting.
The lace project is expanding. Currently we are crocheting crosses. Finnish forests are full of unknown Roma graves – the church did not allow Roma people to be buried in official cemeteries for a long long while, and historically the death rate has been high, as Roma people were forced to move from one place to another.
I hope to see the crocheted crosses in a Lutheran church as an installation to the sound of slow Roma songs sung in the memory of all those who died and were buried in the unknown graves. It could be a healing process for both communities, Finns and Romas.

The last image: Hilja Grönfors trio performing in Prague, photo TA.