When I told my wife that I'm going again to Syria, she got upset. She said that this week she has lots of work and I should be with the kids in the afternoons.

It has been an unusual year, I've been a family man for many months - cooking, playing and painting. Now it's time for a more hazardous and striking enterprise. I'm prepared for my new Syrian adventure. Abir says that the situation is much more complicated than in last October when I left Damascus but I think I'm still enough hard-boiled to take it.

I booked a flight to Damascus, Syria, for Tuesday. I'm going to stay there one week to install my solo show The West Is an Orientalist Joke at All Art Now. There will be Nisrine's show at the same time and we are planning to improvise something collaborative, too.

Some friends call me crazy and some call me a hero. I think I'm not crazy but consistent with my practice. The political art is not playing with concepts at the studio but going to where the politics happen. I'm neither a hero - the real heroes are those Syrians who try to live their normal life in Syria and defend a secular, multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious society.

When I was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, I earned my living by guiding at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. I often heard confusing people commenting that they could have done some works exhibited in the museum.

I think it's easy to fake the lack of content with technique, talent or big production resources. The true art is about ideas, it's about seeing the everyday world with clarity and precision and making it visible and tangible to others. In fact, the most amazing works of art are exactly those that could have been done by anyone and anywhere. That's why feel particularly satisfied when I make a work like The World's Most Powerful People in Starbucks which consist simply of ordinary paper cups of the global coffeehouse chain and names written on them. It could have been done by anyone but it was me who did it.

On Friday, I went to Madrid to the reception that the ambassador of Finland gave for Martti, the director of the Finnish Cultural Institute, who is leaving his position after five years. Martti programmed my solo show at the Institute few years ago. I also visited the Reina Sofia Museum where I enjoyed the shows of Sharon Hayes and Hans Haacke.

Surprisingly, the best thing in Madrid was my visit, the second in my life, to a Starbucks coffeehouse where  my cousin - who had spent few days in our place in Cervera - took me, me when we arrived buy bus in Madrid. If I had been alone, I would have drank my café con leche in a traditional Spanish bar and not in a franchise of an American chain inside a shopping mall. I ordered a small cappuccino (which was huge) and the waiter asked my name. I was baffled and said he could call me Paco.

The paper cups and the customers' names written on them gave me an idea for my next piece. When I had been all the afternoon having drinks with the Finns, I went again to Starbucks before catching the bus back home. I got ten empty cups and now I'm going to write them the names of the most powerful stars of the global politics and business: Vladimir, Angela, Carlos, Abdullah, Jintao...

Painting is easy - you just go to an art material supplier and get stretchers, canvas and gesso and begin to work. Most of the artists buy their high quality acid-free paper in the same stores but I dislike the paper made for artistic use. Drawing is more personal, direct and true than painting and therefore the material has to have more life, too.

When I was student, I found a stack of rather heavy yellowish paper in a Spanish discount shop, it lasted a couple of years. My next paper, that I've been using until now, was stolen: When I was finishing my MFA degree, I worked in the museum education department of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, and my boss had found a huge pile of interesting paper in an abandoned paper factory. It was used in kids´ workshops but as it was the best paper I had ever seen, I decided to expropriate some boxes of it.

Ironically, I have sold to the same museum drawings made on this paper thieved from them. Unfortunately, now it's over, I have only two sheets left. During this spring, I've tried other papers of different styles and qualities but I can't find anything that could replace the old, found and then stolen material.

One of the most famous works of Robert Rauschenberg is the iconoclastic Erased de Kooning Drawing.  The young Rauschenberg asked the middle-aged Willem de Kooning to give him a drawing that he could erase. Maybe I have to erase now my own drawings and then use the paper again.