No More Violence

"Näin unta jossa mut hakkasi sellanen venäläinen iso juntti. Sit mä sain poliisilta pippurisuihkeen ja se rauhottui."
(I dreamed that I was beaten by some big Russian brute. Then the police gave me pepper spray and he calmed down.)

The dream arrived blunt and cartoonish — a bad joke about power, force, and the strange fantasy of state protection. One moment, fists and panic; the next, a little canister of pepper spray, as if violence could be solved by pressing down on a nozzle.

Dreams reveal the residue of what we carry. Mine seem to hold onto the idea of being punished, of being subdued by something larger, something blunt. Perhaps that’s why art itself sometimes feels like a kind of sanctioned beating: the critique, the grading, the institution’s gaze.

"Mä suhtaudun tähän taiteen tekemiseen liian kiltti oppilas -maisesti."
(I approach this art-making too much like a good student.)

There it is — the obedient posture, the readiness to please, the hope that if I do things correctly the blows will stop. But the truth is: the blows never stop. Not in art, not in life. The rules only multiply, and the more faithfully they are followed, the less room remains for the work itself.

So what would it mean to say: no more violence?
Not just the obvious kind — fists, pepper spray, nightmares — but also the subtle violences of expectation, of obedience, of playing the “good student.”

It might mean making art with a crooked spine, ignoring the voice that says be nice, be proper, do it right.
It might mean refusing to soften the edges, refusing to perform gratitude for every critique.
It might mean stepping out of the dream where the brute always wins.

The canister of pepper spray was never the point. The point is to stop rehearsing the violence at all. To make something that resists by existing, stubborn and uncorrected.