You Will Be Obscure

“Mä voisin olla Kuvataideakatemian käynyt ja silti yhtä obscure and culturally irrelevant as now.”
(diary entry, June 25, 2015)

Lesson 1: You will be obscure. The question is—will you survive it?

In 2015, I stood between disciplines, identities, and eras.

Not quite an artist, not quite a strategist.
A former senior manager from Nokia, now sitting in Tokoinranta with a notebook, haunted by the ghosts of corporate relevance and artistic irrelevance.
Folding in 4 years, 5 months of silence into a single realization:

I had a secret. And that secret would change everything.

It wasn't a plan. It wasn't a product. It was a threshold—a recognition that the path forward would not be found by asking which career title to choose, or which platform to post on, or which job to apply for.

It would be found by accepting obscurity.

Radical obscurity.

Not as failure, but as a mythological phase-state—a kind of chrysalis. The necessary darkness before a true form can emerge. A state where systems dissolve and new identities are composed of fragments, metaphors, dreams, and doubt.

“Taide. Strategia. Tietojenkäsittelytiede.
Yritysympäristössä mä loistin. Avoimessa maailmassa stumbling.” (July 12, 2015)

I didn’t know it yet, but I had begun mythologizing my own practice.
Not building a portfolio.
Not chasing recognition.
But letting the formless period do its real work.

Lesson 1 is this: If you're between identities, between careers, between structures—stay there. Stay. Observe the obscure. Survive the irrelevance.

Because if you can survive your own obscurity, something unreplicable begins to form inside it.

And one day—years later—you will find yourself standing on the cliff edge, speaking again. But this time, not as a seeker. As a signal.

Maa Kuu, A New Dawn, digital image, 2025