Dispatch #30
Read about Finland’s unconventional street art movement, Vietnam’s forgotten Catholic migration after the Geneva Accords and the lives unfolding inside Valencia’s abandoned Formula 1 racetrack
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
First up, from Finland, the story of an unlikely champion of street art who has turned abandoned walls into canvases of connection, challenging norms while giving urban spaces a second life.
From Vietnam, a look back at the great Catholic migration southward after the Geneva Accords – a forgotten chapter of Cold War history that reshaped communities and faith across the country.
And from Spain, we visit Valencia, where life unfolds inside the shell of an abandoned Formula 1 circuit, a precarious settlement that thrives in the shadow of the city’s indifference.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
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When you come from outside, you approach things differently
Finnish street art’s unconventional champion talks about breaking norms, building bridges and giving walls a second life
Jouni Väätänen, better known as Mr. Purkutaide, has made a career out of filling Finland’s forgotten spaces with colour, political bite and unexpected community connections. In an interview with the Finnish magazine Voima, he reflects on his outsider beginnings, coming into the art world without formal training and how that allowed him to see the possibilities others didn’t. His projects, such as Purkutaide’s large-scale murals in demolished or temporary buildings, embrace the ephemeral nature of street art while opening space for broader conversations about urban change.
For Väätänen, street art isn’t just about visual spectacle but about “how people meet and talk to each other through walls.” He describes his role as part artist, part facilitator, connecting local communities with artists from across Finland and abroad. By repurposing condemned buildings as temporary canvases, Purkutaide transforms dead space into cultural events that belong to everyone, thus resisting the commodification of public art.
But working outside established institutions and in unusual formats comes with challenges, from navigating municipal regulations to securing funding for projects that are intentionally impermanent. He frames these constraints as creative catalysts. “When you have to work around rules, you end up inventing new ones,” he tells Voima.
The conversation also touches on the politics of public space: who gets to shape the visual narrative of a city, and how power and permission intersect in the art world. Väätänen is clear that for him, the most important thing is keeping the door open by bringing in first-time painters, encouraging experimentation and making sure the art reflects the community rather than just the artist’s ego.
Looking ahead, he sees potential in expanding Purkutaide’s collaborations with international street art networks, as well as exploring intersections with activism and emphasises that art in public space can’t be neutral, that even a flower is still a choice about the kind of world one wants to live in. His vision remains anchored in both the playful and the political, in murals that are as much about joy as they are about shifting perspectives.
Original article (“‘Kun tulee ulkopuolelta, niin asioihin suhtautuu toisin’ – Jouni Väätänen on Herra Purkutaide”) by Jari Tamminen was first published in Finnish on 24 June 2025.
It is available here.
Voima is a Finnish independent magazine focusing on culture, politics and activism. Voima is known for its critical, progressive reporting and for amplifying alternative voices in Finnish and global contexts.
Summary by ZN
“God has gone south”: The southward migration of Catholics after the Geneva Accords
A window into an overlooked chapter of history – the exodus of Vietnam’s Catholic minority from North to South after French withdrawal and partition
On 10 October 1954, Hanoi was a city holding its breath. The Viet Minh had marched into the capital a day before, and the last French troops had retreated, ending seventy years of colonial occupation. The people took to the streets for a liberation that had finally come. However, not everyone celebrated. In the Catholic quarters of the North, there were no flowers, victorious chants, or even waving of the iconic red flag with the yellow star. Doors were bolted. Chapels stood hollow. The faithful were already gone or preparing to leave.
This evocative image of religious silence amidst revolutionary jubilation is one of many drawn from a recent article by Luật Khoa, a Vietnamese independent online journal that revisited this moment in history. The article is a window into how the North’s Catholic communities experienced the dramatic aftermath of the Geneva Accords.
These people were a part of an exodus – a movement of nearly a million people, most of them Catholic, heading south. Some travelled on foot; many others on crowded trains, or French and American-backed convoys. Carrying their rosaries and what little they could bring from their ancestral homes, they called it a passage to freedom. But history would come to remember it differently.
Months earlier, the shattering French defeat at Điện Biên Phủ had torn off the veil of colonial military supremacy in Indochina. In Geneva, half a world away, diplomats drew a line across Vietnam like a seam: North to be governed by the national communists; South by the anti-communists, with the promise of a national election to follow. That vote never came. But for Vietnam’s Catholic minority, the Geneva Accords were a verdict, posing both an opportunity and a challenge: to stay in the North or migrate to the South?
Under French rule, many Catholics held a delicate status – simultaneously benefiting from colonial power and experiencing religious persecution. It would not be fair to say they were entirely privileged, but they were at least protected. In the new North, that sense of protection evaporated overnight; “after the Viet Minh victory, their future prospects became more uncertain than ever.” Parishioners feared reprisals. Priests were troubled with the threat of land seizures and surveillance. The question on everyone’s lips was: should we stay?
The French and American governments were eager to cast the South as a bastion of freedom, and offered an answer. Operation Passage to Freedom – part evacuation, part propaganda – ferried hundreds of thousands southwards between 1954 and 1955. Most of these refugees were Catholics. They would be dubbed “Bắc 54” (“the Northerners of ’54”), a name that later would come to imply difference and even mark suspicion.
They came to the South with the promise of a better life and a government led by one of their own: Ngô Đình Diệm, a devout Catholic with a vision of modernisation and control. But Diem, wary of factionalism, did not fully trust the Northern newcomers. Rather than letting them settle together and build new enclaves, he scattered them across hundreds of refugee camps. The idea, on paper, was integration. In practice, it felt like exile all over again.
Most of the refugees never fully unpacked. They held on to their northern dialects, northern devotions and a belief that this southern chapter was temporary. But the Church was already making its own decisions. By 1960, the Vatican had quietly reorganised the structure of Vietnamese Catholicism, placing its formal authority in the South and effectively abandoning the dioceses of the North. It was a bureaucratic gesture, but to the Northern faithful, it felt like a second betrayal.
Tensions followed them into their new homes. Southern villagers watched uneasily as the government replaced local leaders with Catholic migrants. Accusations of favouritism spread, which only made it more difficult for the newly arrived refugees to integrated. As Dr. Jessica Elkind writes in her book, The Virgin Mary is Going South: “The success of the resettlement programme did not mean true integration.” These were not merely numbers to be absorbed but people in suspension – caught between a lost homeland and a future that remained out of reach.
Over time, some would become prominent voices in the anti-communist cause. Others would quietly fade into the background of the South that was itself unravelling, or even find ways to leave Vietnam completely. But in October 1954, as the bells of St Joseph’s Cathedral rang out over a city about to change hands, they walked away from the only home they had known.
Luật Khoa’s article offers a haunting look at this underreported history – one shaped not just by ideology or geopolitics, but by memory, migration and the fragile promise of faith.
Original article (“Cuộc Nam tiến của người Công giáo sau Hiệp định Genève”) by Thúc Kháng was first published in Vietnamese on the 5 July 2025.
It is available here.
Luật Khoa is a Vietnamese law journal that pursues independent and high-quality journalism. It was founded in 2014 by Trịnh Hữu Long, Phạm Đoan Trang, Trần Quỳnh Vi and Trương Tự Minh. Their maxim is “Fear no one, flatter no one”.
Summary by TMH
Lives Parked on the Valencia F1 Circuit
On the grounds of an abandoned racetrack, an organised yet precarious settlement the Spanish city of Valencia would rather not see
What was once a showcase for speed and spectacle now functions as a refuge of last resort.
Along the old harbour stretch of Valencia’s old Formula 1 circuit, disused wooden pallets and sheets of ply are clustered beneath palm trees and floodlights, stitched together with tarps, wire and unrelenting hope into homes. Residents of the encampment describe an uneasy calm: by day, people mend walls, sort scrap and tend to kids. The night can be different: voices carry, tempers flare and the police sometimes roll through to check IDs and registration papers. “At least this settlement is consolidated and has unwritten laws to ensure its safety. It’s quite organised,” one volunteer in the settlement observes. The Spanish phrase “Aquí tenemos normas propias” (“We have our own rules”) echoes here like a local constitution.
This article from a local Valencian newspaper follows the lives of Joana and her teenage son Antonio in the camp, as they salvage what they can and keep a wary eye on fires that sometimes break out when tempers, or braziers, run hot. The camp is informally divided by nationality, she explains: the Romanians in one row, North Africans in another, with women and children improvising routines that make the place feel liveable. Valencia’s local social services count only a fraction of those who truly live here. The numbers on paper don’t match reality: people arrive and disappear with the seasons and the availability of work.
Work, when it comes, is itinerant and gruelling. Jamal, who lives off what the city throws away, pushes a cart piled with cables and cans. “They pay 10 cents a kilo. Very little,” he shrugs, then adds a simple self-check, “I’m fine,” which reads as equal parts pride and denial. The micro-economy in the area around the settlement has changed: “Cars used to pass by the store, but now they’ve closed the entrances and only motorcycles come,” complains a shopkeeper in reference to traffic barriers meant to hide the settlement from passers-by, and which have choked off the flow of customers. Mutual aid knits together the gaps the state has left open. Hairdressers who occasionally set up chairs near the track emphasise that they don’t just cut the hair of their customers but engage them in conversation to make them feel seen and heard.
Danger is a constant whisper here. Nights bring shouting, fights erupt; a neighbour rises with a stick to challenge what he swears is “el diablo” by the palm tree. Fires burn for heat and cooking; sometimes they burn too much. Police presence has increased, residents say, but official attention still oscillates between discrete evictions elsewhere and the slow tolerance that lets this camp persist because there is nowhere else to go. A recent count across Valencia found homelessness up by more than a fifth, with 815 people dispersed across 37 settlements, making it a citywide problem.
And yet, within the labyrinth, norms do hold. People look out for one another’s children, informal curfews help keep the peace and disputes are sorted out before they spiral. Another resident shares that he isn’t afraid that he will one day leave this place, but is fearful about what lies beyond: waiting lists, unaffordable rents, precarious jobs that vanish with the season. On race days a decade ago, this ribbon of asphalt was a televised dream of velocity. Today, its slow lanes are thick with the ordinary heroics of survival and neighbours enforcing rules so that the rest of the world, which built, sold and abandoned this track, does not swallow them whole.
Original article (“Vidas aparcadas en el circuito de F1: ‘Aquí tenemos normas propias’’) by Claudio Moreno was published in Spanish on 25 May 2025.
It is available here.
Levante-EMV is a Valencian regional daily newspaper focused on local and regional politics, society and culture in the Comunitat Valenciana.
Summary by ZN
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team