Greetings from the beach! I'm in Playa del Ingles overcoming tourisim until 10th April with mikroPaliskunta 'The Finnish on Holiday' expedition. Follow us on www.mikroPaliskunta.net

Next Sunday – that's 20th April – mkk and I will talk and discuss the mikroPaliskunta project at Wonderbar. It is hosted by Freja and Lady Gaby and in the meantime we'll have a hearty and arty brunch. Invitation proper below. Come! Come!

Freja und Lady Gaby ladet Euch Herzlich ein:

A travel through Finland for Frühstück and to the Sekt a trip around Berlin with Mika Meskanen and Mari Keski-Korsu from the project mikroPaliskunta

Frühstücks Buffet (nicht nur Künst, auch Brot) ab 13Uhr am Sonntag 20.4. in Wonderbar Wiener Str. 45, X-berg.

A reindeer travelled from the northernmost point of European Union to the southernmost point of Finland. Among other things, he visited construction site of Ikea, national scenery in Imatra rapids and Koli, met many Finnish people and carried a camera in his horn to make a country long image line. And what happened in Berlin the next summer? mikroPaliskunta is a series of explorations made in eco-friendly way. The participants are in search for presented national identities (i.e. tourism), outcomes of global structural and ecological changes – to location, identity as well as to the culture. Expeditions vary and so far there have been two of them. They are present on location and in virtual world.
www.mikropaliskunta.net

Found a nice, alternative personal transport solution for the 30-3000 km range. Mechanic and engineer Jochen Sommer has discovered a market niche that addresses unconventional travellers. He imports classic Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles from India and replaces original petrol engines with industrial Hatz diesels.

Besides the coolness of the machine, which is a subjective thing of course, it also runs on biodiesel. Fuel consumption swings around 2,5 litres per 100 km (over 110 mpg) so you can escape at least 500 km with a tankful. Top speed reaches just 100 km/h, but avenues are nicer than Autobahns anyway.

Kabel eins has a video feature in local language.

Our shared flat in Prenzlauer Berg dissolved and I've moved a bit further uptown to Pankow for some time now. The flat is from 1920s, so it dates back to the Weimar Republic, instead that Imperial Germany's final year 1918 of the previous address.

It's nice to have new surroundings to explore. So far I've run into a women's prison, a Jugendstil church, a small-time mall, blockhouses as usual, and a wasteland which I think is an out-of-order Red Army cemetery. All in all it seems I'm in brackish waters where new, old, urban and suburban intertwine.

The best thing of course is, that the flat is curiously located on the exact same latitude as Mega.

Mega is a location near Hönow village east of Berlin. It only exists on Falk maps' 2003 edition and in the minds of the people who've heard about it.

I recommend watching mkk's great four-minute road movie Mysterious Mega on Vimeo.

Poster motif for the Midnight Sun Film Festival / Final steps to Mega.

"Nordic walker at 10 mph" vs. "White reindeer at 50 mph".

The first photo by Eija Mäkivuoti, see the original here.

In a week I'll embark on a bicycle trip with a couple of friends. First, out of Berlin and then around it in anticlockwise direction. It's a direct descendant of the last summer's mikroPaliskunta road trip, but also something completely different.

Just wanted to elaborate on the new thoughts through writing...

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MikroPaliskunta experiments with the contemporary practices of travel, exploration and documentary. The project aims at reviving the journey of exploration in the context of 21st century – by assuming a civil perspective, appropriating do-it-yourself, sustainability and readily available technologies.

The first trip in August 2006 was done with a vintage Volvo ticking with domestic biodiesel. The second one, Berlin round tour, will be on bicycles. The third one might employ sailing as means of transport. The idea is that travelling and sustainability needn't be mutually exclusive.

Events and findings are shared online. The first trip was documented on a single website, organised around themes and locations. The second one will be spread across existing blogging, placemarking and bookmarking services, photo and video sharing websites (i.e. Jaiku, Blogspot, Flickr, Vimeo, Tagzania). Unique tag "mikropaliskunta" will act as a label for relevant content on and between different online spaces. This also facilitates anyone to take part in the "movement", because tagging is open by nature.

As a documentary project mikroPaliskunta assumes no single point of view or method. Perspectives include, but are not limited to – artistic, journalistic and scientific approaches. Diversity of individual perspectives, foci, identities and/or assumed roles is necessary, as that reflects the diversity of our world experiences. This, and the possiblities of mobile production and connectivity have led me into liking to call the online part an "accumulation of near-time microdocumentaries".

Altogether, mikroPaliskunta is inherently post-scientific – we acknowledge the vanity of our efforts in the age of Google Earth and Wikipedia, but in the same time we, out of curiosity, engage in a journey of exploration, as if our maps were decorated with "Here Be Dragons".

...have arrived! The colour options are lime, black and orange. Available in basic and ladyfit, 14 EUR per piece. See official ordering instructions at mikroPaliskunta website. If you fancy one in Germany, you can drop me a note as well. I'm an official dealer :)