EAT. is the name of a chain restaurant in London. It sounds like an order. According to A., it's a remainder of the aggressive aesthetics of the nineties.  At the Southbank we visit the ABBA exhibit…

I'm at Saint George English Bookshop and see a book about Russian avant-garde in fiction. P. tells me he's reading a new book about Eastern Europe. "It's really good but also super sp…

First snowman of the year! Day 1 “I had the best Russian food in Helsinki,” a friend from Belgium writes me in an email. I’m wondering if it’s inappropriate to say so about a country that has be…

Yesterday I listened to an interview with Naomi Klein on BBC4 radio. She was great, and she had a beautiful laugh that she laughed a lot. After a while the interviewer asked her what she did for fu…

In Helsinki I drink kahvi. It’s the cheapest drink, only 2 euros with a refill included. I once had a refill, trying to make the most out of my 2 euros. My heart trembled on my way home. Finnish coffe…

Photo by fellow HIAP resident artists Gil & Moti Gallery hopping night is on Thursdays in Helsinki. For a calm and cold city, the art scene is quite happening. We manage to see four openings and …

Entering Tirana with a cab, I’m looking for the houses that were painted by Edi Rama, the former artist mayor of Tirana who’s now Albania’s prime minister. That’s how I know about Tirana in the first plac…

"It makes no sense", laughs the artist who's carrying the hat. “It uses the strategies of contemporary art but it’s not contemporary art,” so the gallerist. “When my eyes are open,…

I landed in Iceland with WOW-Air. The captain announced that we arrived twenty minutes ahead of time. In the WOW-Air magazine they warned tourists not to write their name in moss and not to hunt sheep. …

Aphorisms are a great way to stretch the brain , to think big, like universe- and humanity-big. They're also called "street poetry" or "literature's handluggage." Last Sunda…

Flash fiction is a bit like poetry. It acquires a mindset that is alert to things. "Do not dream of influencing other people," Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own , "Think …

Panel at Me Collection for the exhibition Portrait of a Nation I always brace myself before I go to the talk of the Preis der Nationalgalerie, which happens every two years. I know that the sound wil…