'bomb scars bring the wall back to rock': artist pavel rotts maps war through climbing

climbing across the remains of narva, estonia

In Estonia’s Narva Castle Park, a child reaches for the cast of an angel’s head and pulls upward, using a fragment of carved stone under one foot. The holds are bright enough to belong in a climbing gym, yet their shapes come from a city that largely disappeared during World War II. Families gathered around Pavel Rotts’ installation throughout its run, and children climbed so often that the grass surrounding the wall wore away. What begins as a familiar and playful encounter soon turns into contact with the broken architecture of Baroque Narva.

Pavel Rotts made molds of architectural fragments held by Narva Museum and recast them in the plastic resin used for climbing holds. A putto’s face sits beside a curled volute — pieces that once belonged to separate facades now share one vertical field. As visitors move between them, their bodies form temporary connections across a city assembled from absence. ‘In a way, it becomes a journey through an imaginary city with your own body,‘ the artist tells designboom.

Speaking stones, Pavel Rotts, Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, 2026 | image © Liis Saarepere

a bomb scar becomes a handhold

The project begins in Helsinki in 2018, several years after Pavel Rotts moved to Finland from Russia as an Ingrian Finn. His family history crosses the same wartime border he studies through the city’s surfaces. One grandfather experienced Soviet attacks in Finland, while the other survived Finnish air raids in Petrozavodsk. Rotts had wanted to work with Helsinki’s remaining scars for years, though his first approaches stayed visual. Climbing opened a physical route into the subject. ‘I’m a climber. I like to climb,‘ the artist says. ‘It’s an urge that lives in my body.‘

Standing at Pitkäsilta, the granite bridge between Kallio and central Helsinki, Rotts noticed how bomb damage interrupted an otherwise flat wall. The small craters created edges for fingers and feet. ‘These bomb scars bring this architectural wall back to rock,‘ he explains. That observation ties the project to climbing’s older relationship with risk, where a tiny chipped surface can support a person’s full weight. For Rotts, the intensity held in such a feature echoes the charge of a wartime trace, a mark left at the point where a shell struck stone.

Speaking stones, Pavel Rotts, Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, 2026 | image © Stanislav Stepaško / Art Museum of Estonia

the logic of a climbing gym

Although the wall operates as sculpture, its routes grow from the functional language of climbing. Rotts borrows the bright color coding used in gyms, where a route reads through the holds assigned to it. ‘Their appearance grows out of how they are meant to be climbed,‘ he explains. For larger works, he collaborates with professional route setters who consider reach and difficulty. The upcoming Helsinki edition at Forum Box is developed with Felix Damsky of KiipeilyAreena, who shapes each route through his knowledge of how bodies move across a wall.

Smaller gallery versions often follow the logic of a spray wall, with holds scattered across the surface in a dense, irregular arrangement. Rotts compares this format to a Jackson Pollock painting, where a pattern begins to emerge through attention. ‘Only in your mind do you begin to connect them,‘ he says. The same idea returns to the broken city. Fragments gather on one surface, and visitors join them through their own movement. ‘They come together on one wall,‘ Rotts adds, ‘and visitors can physically reconnect them with their own bodies through climbing.‘