Series of five performances
Helsinki, Finland, 2021–22
Photographer: Aman Askarizad
Supported by Taike (Arts Promotion Centre Finland)
Read Matti Tanskanen’s report on the project here.

On 23 August 2021 an announcement appeared on the Helsingin Sanomat website, inviting any Finn who could hold a conversation in English and who did not know me to take part in a series of durational performances called Saturdays. The idea was that I would give one Saturday — sixteen hours, from eight in the morning until midnight — to each of the first five strangers who signed up.

I documented each day with two photographs: one taken in the morning, when we met, and one before we parted. As the day went on I also collected objects that stood for its high points. In June 2022 all the material from the project was shown at Myymälä 2 Gallery in Helsinki.

A stranger is by definition cut off from the social structures and relationships that hold communal life together. That isolation cuts both ways: it can feel like freedom and self-possession, and it can just as easily turn into alienation and loneliness. Saturdays looks at the experience of being a stranger in Finnish society by setting up situations in which that encounter can happen.