Future Plans and the Limits of Time

The future has always been a horizon I look toward with both longing and caution. Plans are fragile things. They bend under pressure, collapse under circumstance, and sometimes dissolve into nothing at all. And yet, the act of making them is what keeps me moving forward.

As I wrote in my diary in the spring of 2016: “Kun pimeässä makuuhuoneessa tunnustelin itseäni et mitä mä oikeesti haluan niin kyl mä kuvataideakatemiaan tai maahan haluan, taideoppilaitokseen josta valmistuu nykytaiteilijaksi. Tää oli ihan selvää ja lienee sitä vieläkin.” “In that dark bedroom, touching the core of myself, I knew what I truly wanted: to step into the world of contemporary art. That knowledge has not left me.”

But time is never endless. It presses down with its own weight, demanding choices, demanding sacrifices. My diary shows this tension again and again: the sense that there is only so much of me, and only so many years left to spend. “Aikaa on aina liian vähän. Pitää valita, ja jokainen valinta sulkee pois muita polkuja.” “There is always too little time. One has to choose, and every choice rules out other paths.”

Perhaps that is why my work orbits the theme of exile. Exile is not only geographical, it is temporal. To be exiled is to feel the limits of time, to sense the doors that will never open again. My future plans are not blueprints but sketches drawn on fragile paper, easily torn.

And yet, there is hope in that fragility. If nothing is certain, then everything is possible. The seasons still turn, and I still release work with their rhythm. I build not toward a fixed destination but toward a practice that sustains me. Future, in this sense, is less about reaching than about continuing.

Time is short. But art stretches it, bends it, cracks it open. In the cracks, I find room enough to create.