I've been staying in Sari's place. She's my curator. There is no hotel in Pukkila but, in any case, I like it this way. Sari cooks for me and I play chess with her ten-year-old daughter.

Exhibiting in Pukkila has been exactly as I imagined. The mayor came to shake hands when I arrived and there was a line of journalist from all the four newspapers of the area. Each of them interviewed me for one hour.

Koivulinna, the exhibition venue, is not a white cube but a shack that can collapse any moment. I don't know if I can show the photos to anybody, people would think that the bubbling wallpapers are part of my installation. This summer I have been specializing in shanty shows - also the space of All Art Now in Damascus was a run-down building, even before the war in Syria.

I'm going tomorrow to Pukkila, a village with a population of two thousand located in the Southern Finland. I'm going to do a show called The Feasibilty Study of Turbo-Capitalism at their small public art gallery Koivulinna.

My neighbor Luis asked does it make any sense to exhibit in so tiny and periferic place. We ourselves live even in a smaller village but he is used to drive me sometimes to airport when I'm going to big cities. Berlin and Beijing have a magcial sound in their names but the reality is in many cases different. Last year, I did a show in Paris, there were maybe 25 people in the opening and supposedly few more people saw the works afterwards. Nobody wrote about the exhibition and no works were sold.

I don't think that Pukkila will be comercially significant but I'm sure that a half of the population of the municipality and many summer tourists will see my works. I'll be for a couple of days a real super star in the village. I'm a revolutionary artist and I have to do art for masses and all the classes. I have to target my works not only to urban population but also to peasants.

Luckily, I have time to stop one night in Helsinki to have dinner and some gin and tonics with my artist and capitalist friends, before penetrating the Finnish country side.

They call me a political artist. Many of my works are about the power, the authority, the economy and the social issues but I've always tried to be ambiguous about my ideas and opinions. My role as artist is not to do propaganda and to tell people what to think but make things visible and decode them, suggest alternative ways to understand the society and the global capitalism.

Syria has been a different case. It’s the first time that I’ve adopted in public a clear political position without an ironic attitude defending the secular Syrian society against the Islamist rebellion. It is easy to be sarcastic from the comfort of the Western European art world but in my two trips to Syria, the latter one during the civil war, I faced real fear and danger in the first person. My life wasn’t threaten but I was working with people who didn’t know if they were going to be alive soon. Now I continue in contact with them on a daily basis and it’s difficult to maintain a cool distance to the current events. The reality kills the irony.

Will this change my art or my way of being an artist? I don’t know but at least it is transforming my way of understanding the world. The personal experience might also influence permanently the artist known as Riiko Sakkinen.

I've said many times that Syrian government does bad propaganda. They want to picture themselves as tough guys but I think the Westerners would prefer to buy a softer message making clear that the country is a victim of the US geopolitical agenda and Islamist madmen.

The most interesting internet personality related to the current events is Mimi Al-Laham aka Syrian Girl or Syrian Partisan Girl. She is a beautiful young lady based in Dubai analyzing on Youtube videos the situation in Syria and the motivations of the players involved exposing the hypocrisy underlying the entire humanitarian intervention farce and the real agenda that is driving the attempted overthrow of the Syrian government.

In her Facebook profile, Syrian Girl descibes herself as a Syrian patriot, anti-imperialist and anti-New World Order. Her interests are geopolitics, fashion, war and kittens. The combination sounds like my art!

This is what Syrian Girl tell about herself and her opinions: 100% Syrian to the core, many generations back. I'm of a Sunni Muslim background. My family was part of the ruling class before they were deposed from power by the Ba'athist coup. My opinion on the Syrian government - I have no illusions in any government anywhere in the world. My opinion on Bashar Al-Assad - an educated nice face for the real powers. Do figure heads ever have all the power? No. My opinion on parliamentary democracy? Hah, it's a sham! A failed and inferior system, especially when you are voting for people not for ideas, especially if it's a two-party system with two equivalent parties. But if that's what people want, that is what they should have. It will change little, but better for it to happen through a sovereign Syria, rather than the destruction of Syria and the Syria-Iran alliance by the dogs of war of Israel, NATO and company.

Dear Riiko,

Now we have electricity for a while and I can write you few lines. The temperature is 47º Celsius. The rebels are shelling with mortars our neighborhood. Several friends of mine have been killed by them.

If I die, please, tell that we were here supporting our country - not a person. We wanted Syria to be strong and beautiful but the others didn't let us make it happen. They stole the country and our souls.

We don't want their "rights", "freedom" and "democracy". It seems that there is no justice in this world and I find here nothing to believe in, so I've decided to believe in God. I have nothing to lose after the death and maybe I find more justice in the afterlife.

With love and peace from the flower of the world, my lovely Damascus.