So wrote Coleridge of Kubla Khan’s unconventional edifice, when was it, sometime in the 18th century. What follows here may not live up to the poem’s menace and mystique but read on anyway.

The Snow Show does at least promise to be a remarkable cultural event that will bring together internationally recognized artists and architects to design collaborative installations using snow and ice as their primary materials.

In the winter of 2004 these designs will be translated into an outdoor exhibition presenting fifteen unique constructions of significant scale and beauty. The spectacle will be staged jointly in the towns of Kemi and Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland, the country’s most northerly province.

The curators of the Snow Show, and the main minds behind it, are New York independent curator Lance Fung together with the director of the Rovaniemi Art Museum Hilkka Liikkanen, both in cooperation with colleagues in Kemi and Rovaniemi. The exhibition will be open to the public from February 12 to March 31, 2004.

The project also showcased the models and plans of the participating artist-architect pairs at the Venice Biennale of summer 2003 and at Scandinavia House in New York in October-November of 2003. The Snow Show process is due to continue through 2006, with additional venues to be announced later.