A warm early morning, almost hot even before the sun is up, that is exceptional luxury here. The weather will be mainly sunny for the rest of the week, and there are warnings of a heat wave, since more than 25 degrees celsius is considered heat wave here. The sun rose 4.19 or 4.20, but the big red fire-ball showed up above the horizon only later. The sky and the sea were almost pink long before that, and especially the clouds high on the western sky, which were capturing the first rays of the sun.
 
After a break of only one morning the leaves of the aspen seemed to have grown overnight and were now big and green. They transform the image from a deliberate aesthetic composition into something messy, haphazard and undefined. The bare branches somehow marked or accentuated the water behind them, in a very conventional composition, but now the leaves take up too much space and the foreground simply takes over. But of course it is nice to see the transformation, the advance of Spring or Summer.
 
Yesterday I did not record the day break here, since I spent the night watching performance art at gallery Augusta on Suomenlinna. The program finished only in time for the first ferry at six o’clock. I did greet the rising sun there as well, though, by performing a small collective action with my little blue swing, which I had fastened in a tree next to the building. Going out in the fresh morning just before sunrise was more of an intermission than a real performance, although I called it “Swinging at Sunrise”. I placed my camera on the slope to record the tree against the sky and invited people to try out the swing, which they did. I have not looked at the material, but it is probably not very exciting, too large, probably. Perhaps I could nevertheless edit something out of it, and then project it back on the tree during the next event in July, sometime during the night when it is darker.
 
A similar idea, inviting people to swing and record them on video, I will try out at the opening of the Water images exhibition here on Harakka Island. The swing relates to the other videos I will show there, from Year of the Snake Swinging, which is shown at Muu gallery at the moment, finishing today, actually. But how does it relate to these “Mornings in May”, or rather, what do these mornings have to do with the swing project? How can they be combined?
 
This is the drawback in “doing first and thinking afterwards”; it is sometimes hard to conceptualize one’s intuitive decisions. If you make work by impulse and as a practice rather than starting with a concept, you might end up with material that has no point, that has no conceptual relevance at all. And to start to invent some intellectual meaning and add it on top of the material does not always work. There are only a few days left, so I should start editing, and thinking about what to do with all these mornings…