Ei mainoksia, kiitos means "No ads, please." It's a phrase that Finns sometimes put on their mailboxes to ward off junk mail. But artist Kari Cavén inverts it on a mailbox-shaped piece that I saw at EMMA, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (Espoo is 20 km. west of Helsinki): Edes mainoksia, kiitos means, roughly, “Ads At Least, Please." Our museum guide suggested we imagine someone desperate for contact with the outside world, a cry of loneliness.
The EMMA staff discusses this scenario with students who visit (heavy stuff!) and then gives them a way to do something about it. The guides hand out postcards (featuring art from the museum's collection) and invite the kids to sit on mats in the gallery and write a note to someone who they think needs one. The students address their notes to "a child who is sick" or "an old person who is alone." Whatever they write, the staff then follows up and delivers. The education staff members have contacts at retirement communities and hospitals that help them find good matches, and they do as much research as needed to make it happen. (Recognizing my language struggles, I wrote a card to "a child new to the country who is learning Finnish"!)
What is it like to receive a postcard from a stranger? I can only wonder, but I did get a taste of the feeling. My wife and I visited a coffeeshop in Turku and I ordered a cappuccino and a korvapuusti, the delicious Finnish cinnamon roll. The woman at the register said that the previous customer had paid for the next customer's roll! We were astonished. That small gift made me feel so welcome in Turku (and so good about the world).
Around the corner from the lonely mailbox in EMMA was another art piece, "House of Cards," that also invites visitors to share anonymously. As part of a larger exhibition about mid-20th-century modernist architects' visions of the future (Futuremania: Designing Future Living), visitors are asked to draw "your dream home of the future," using nearby colored pencils. Then they can hang their drawings on wires suspended from the ceiling.
The resulting installation is so fragile that it's hard to imagine it lasting 5 minutes in my home museum (!), but perhaps the delicacy encourages people to be gentle? (There's a children's museum downstairs, so this isn't an adults-only venue.). Visitors are asked to put on special soft shoes to enter the space.
The final touch is a perforated postcard that tears off from the drawing card. "Write your address here," it says. "Tear along the dotted line and place the stub in the mail slot...You might get a post from the future."
I dropped mine in. No word yet.
