2006 – 2013
I have walked at the sites of twentieth-century political tragedies, taking as many steps as there were lives lost in each event.
The starting point of Jari Silomäki’s project is Joseph Beuys’s life-size image We Are the Revolution (1972), in which Beuys strides confidently towards the viewer, suggesting that together we might form a revolution. While Beuys believed that art could change society, Silomäki reverses this proposition by following individuals who became subjects of history rather than its masters.
Since 2006, Silomäki has walked at sites of political murder from the twentieth century, taking as many steps as there were victims of each tragedy — from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to Ground Zero in New York. Between these two events lie tens of millions of steps, forming what he describes as the beginning of a “long, impossible project.”
In We Are the Revolution, after Joseph Beuys, Silomäki examines how the individual relates to vast forces such as war, statistics, and centuries of history, portraying the individual as an inevitably solitary part of the historical whole.
I take two steps on the corner of Obala Kulina bana & Zelenih beretki in Sarajevo
I take 174 steps in Lepola, Riihimäki
I take 17,000 steps on the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing
I take 300,000 steps in Nanjing
I walk myself to exhaustion in Auschwitz-Birkenau
I take 237,000 steps on the coast of Normandy
I take hundreds of steps in the forest next to Pindush village in Karelia
I take 3,669 steps in front of the Radio building in Budapest
I walk on the edge of Dealey Plaza in Dallas
I walk in front of the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York
I walk on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis
I take hundreds – and thousands of steps in Tiananmen Square in Beijing
I take 8,100 steps in Srebrenica
I take 92 steps on Guryanova Street in Moscow
I take 45 steps in Račak village, Kosovo
I take 2,995 steps at Ground Zero, New York
