1989 / Tampere, 2019

The exhibition consists of three installations, which are accompanied by an interactive fundraising for the Taiteen Metsä (‘Forest for Art’) campaign organised by the Finnish National Heritage Foundation. The opening of the exhibition will also feature an evening-long performance called AR-Mosquito.

Artist about the work: I wanted to embark on a bike ride to Berlin, and I needed to make some preparations for it. I checked some tips online and bought Osmo Soininvaara’s book “Cycling to Nice”. Then I bought a tent, padded bicycle shorts, a rubber basin plug etc. One evening I went out for a walk in a forest and found a bike frame that seemed adequate for my needs. In early June, I jumped into the saddle.

I spent my days looking for food and shelter. There were so many banal sights that I saw. A bird built a nest underneath the saddle, I lost my credit card in Lithuania, and I could not find my way around in Kaliningrad because I could not read the Cyrillic alphabet. The bird eventually left its nest without laying a single egg. When I arrived in Berlin, I took photographs of trees that had been numbered. I was told that there were altogether 440,000 trees and that each tree had an individual fostering plan.