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 toward the viewer, suggesting that together we might form a revolution. While Beuys believed art could change society, Silomäki reverses this idea by following individuals who became subjects of history rather than its masters.

Since 2006, he has walked at political murder sites of the 20th 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 explores 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.