Community Curated Exhibition: Wireless – For the Love of Radio

When Juha Lahtinen was seven years old, he was given a small red, battery-powered travel radio. That one radio sparked his interest in collecting, and began a love for radios that has lasted for nearly fifty years. Today, Lahtinen’s large collection includes many different kinds of radios, each with its own story. Together, they paint a picture of the history of radio in Finland.

When I was 13, I found a wartime field radio in a scrap shop in Haaga. It weighed 14 kilos, and I dragged it to the railway station, metre by metre.

Wireless – For the Love of Radio showcases selected pieces from Lahtinen’s collection to a wider audience. The exhibition presents radios as technological innovations, as design objects, and as something that brought people together and opened the door to new experiences. It warmly describes the joy of collecting and a deep love for radio, while also highlighting Finnish radio expertise and the work of small Finnish radio manufacturers.

The exhibition displays radios from the 1920s to the 1980s, including those used by soldiers in the 1940s. Through these objects, visitors can follow the development of radio technology and radio use. A special listening corner invites visitors to sit and enjoy old radio programmes, and to experience for themselves how exciting it once was to connect with the world wirelessly.

Wireless – For the Love of Radio has been created as a community curated exhibition. Community curated exhibitions give individuals and groups interested in technology the chance to build their own exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Technology. The Exhibitions are produced in close cooperation with the museum’s experts. These exhibitions bring and welcome more voices into the museum.

Radio collector Juha Lahtinen is especially interested in typical devices from radio history as well as radios in very good condition or with unusual features. For him, one of the most important parts of the exhibition is the chance to converse with visitors. He hopes the exhibition brings back memories and perhaps gives new ideas about what radio can mean.