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Project website: http://www.mikropaliskunta.net
Some of my mikroPaliskunta related shortfilms:
Mysterious Mega, 2006
Reindeer Paavo’s travels in Finnish national sceneries: Koli and Imatra, 2006
Reindeer’s urban visit, 2008
Canary Coffee I, II and III, 2009
mikroPaliskunta is a series of art expeditions made in a sustainable way. It started as an expedition through Finland from the Northest Nuorgam to the Southest Hanko studying contemporary image of Finland in 2006. Who is Finnish? What are the symbols of Finland? How has the image of Finland changed? Does it really exist? The expedition travelled by a biodiesel car that was packed with five artists and protagonist of the project; a stuffed reindeer that is searching for new members to its herd.
There was a camera attached to the reindeer’s horn that took pictures trough the whole trip for image line with GPS-coordinates in each individual picture. This image line reaches trough the whole country and functions as an interface to all the materials collected form the trip.
The next mikroPaliskunta expedition was by bicycles in summer 2007: mikroPaliskunta Berlin Round Tour 2007. This time there was an aim to explore nations from point of view of an foreign country. Berlin Round Tour 2007 events and findings were shared again online. The first trip was documented on a single website, organised around themes and locations. The second one spread across existing blogging, placemarking and bookmarking services, photo and video sharing websites (i.e. Jaiku, Blogspot, Flickr, Vimeo, Tagzania). Unique tag “mikropaliskunta” acts as a label for relevant content on and between different online spaces. This also facilitates anyone to take part in the “movement”, because tagging is open by nature.
The newest project of mikroPaliskunta is a serie of expeditions to the key destinations of Finnish tourists: Canary Islands and Sokos Hotel Vantaa (so caller party ferry on land) in 2009. The theme of the expeditions is The Finnish on holiday. For the series, a new web site of mikroPaliskunta was launched.
I am an initiator, artist and executive producer for mikroPaliskunta. My personal interests are nationalism, imagined nation, communities, tourism and (global) eco- structural change in the society.
