In fall 2013 Anti Contemporary Art Festival presented a challenge to three artists to live one week on an isolated island Hietasalo, in Kuopio, Finland. Invited artists besides myself where Tomi Kosonen of the cult-famous band Aavikko and comic artist and writer Jyrki Heikkinen. We were strangers to each other when sent to the island for a week. We lived in tents and cooked our food with fire, and while each of us created performances directly into the nature of the island.

Inspired by the philosophical novel Aristos by John Fowles, I created Nemo Performance which reflected on John Fowles concept called Nemo. Nemo Performance was the first immaterial work and performance I have made. During boat transport to the island three viewers could sign up into a private session about life, fears and meaning of art with me.

I had built a structure resembling a reindeer enclosure in the forest, with two chairs in the middle. I offered tea and snacks to the people while we talked. I also read some small excerpts on the concept of Nemo from the book Aristos by John Fowles. John Fowles thinks that each human psyche has a fourth element- the nemo, which coexists with but differs from the other three. It is a constituent part of the self, but it is a negative psychic force, a kind of anti-ego. It comes from the feeling we all are familiar with - trivialness and powerlessness. Fowles says that there are two principal ways to defeat the nemo: conform or conflict.

“The Nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am: the Nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utitluzing the Nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrifies by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.” John Fowles, The Aristos, 1964