Before starting something new it is a good idea to at least summarize the old thing. A strange little project, mainly published on instagram, has been going on since 2014, with a sliding beginning, but a very clear ending. See here. The first image was posted 22 July 2015 on Menorca (see the image above). It was the first image I ever posted on instagram, a picture of the stone against ultramarin blue paint on a wall on Menorca. The last image was taken on the beach in Jandia on Fuerteventura on the last day of the year 2017, deliberately as an ending of the project.
 

 

 
Actually the first time the small stone with the red arrow shows up on this blog or is mentioned anywhere, is in a post from Oulanka Nature Park on 14 September 2014. There I write about “some experiments with a small pebble I picked on Harakka Island earlier and painted a red arrow on, somewhat reminiscent of the double happiness sign I painted on a roof tile in Farrera in 1999, which resulted in the video work Double Happiness in Water (2001). This pebble with the arrow I placed in the corner of the image, pointing towards something worth focusing on.” (see the blog post here) And as it happens the arrow is pointing at water in that image.
 

 
The point of the project on instagram was to use the arrow to point at water in various forms, to highlight our dependence on water and the importance of water for life on the planet, as well as the various forms that water can take, its many transformations and uses. And to experiment with social media as a platform for a project, of course. Many of the images in the beginning contain drinking water, while most of the later images are beautiful landscapes with water in the background. My idea was to use instagram for a specific project, not for images in general, as most people do, but every now and then I added also images without the arrow. Before writing these notes I went through them and deleted all the others, to make the documentation ”clean”, thus the arrow images posted on instagram are now 210. What to do with the rest of the images – there are of course a lot more of them than the ones posted on instagram, and many variations of those ones, too – is another problem. The main reason for making these notes is to close the project in some manner, in order to begin a new one, which I describe briefly here.