Dialogue:
East Depends on Us – Or Does It? Creativity at the Core of Regional Vitality

What if the thing we’ve been cutting from budgets is actually one of the most powerful engines for regional vitality and future growth?

At SOHJO 2026, two formidable voices from the heart of Eastern Finland take the stage to disrupt how we think about the regions creative value: Tiia-Mari Mäkinen and Virpi Rautsiala.

Tiia-Mari Mäkinen is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural producer and visionary who has spent decades shaping artistic practice into community experience both internationally and locally. Her work moves fluidly between performance, visual arts and audience engagement — and always with a bold stance on why culture matters. Tiia-Mari pushes boundaries not just in art, but in how art intersects with everyday life, identity and place.

Virpi Rautsiala is a creative entrepreneur, highly experienced actor and advocate for the cultural sector. With rich experience in developing cultural policy, cultural education and arts entrepreneurship, Virpi has been a clear and uncompromising voice for valuing creativity as a force of societal innovation. Her work cuts through simplistic economic metrics and asks fundamental questions about how we measure impact and why culture is central — not peripheral — to thriving communities.

Together, they bring to SOHJO a highly relevant and luminous dialogue: East Depends on Us – Or Does It? This is about the true value of creative work in a world obsessed with quantification and shortcuts. They challenge us to ask:

Is creativity a line item on a budget — or the spark that ignites entire economies?
Can Eastern Finland leverage its cultural capital to fuel broader innovation and growth?

This conversation is both a call to rethink and a roadmap for action — where creative expression, social resilience and economic courage converge. Expect bold insights, unexpected turns and a rallying argument for elevating creative industries into the mainstream of regional development.

Because at SOHJO, we don’t just talk about the future.
We illuminate it.