Still questioning how to activate Poris inhabitants and how can durational performance art in public places heighten the alertness from the recipient, without being just weird or alien to the nature of the witnesses, I go out at 8am with the aim to ask as much pedestrians, sales assistance and policemen as possible, if they remember the first street they lived in Pori. The second question is what is the most beautiful place in Pori and what is the worst place in Pori. I have a city map with me and three different colours of felt pens to marking the mentioned places. I expect to get a full map of good and bad places or even a situation where a lot of people like a special area in the town and a special area which they did not like. I will do performances there during the next days.
Four hours later I just have 2 times the same place for the most beautiful place in Pori, it is Yyteri one of the most famous beach in Finland at all, one other beautiful place and just one woman from the tourist office said that she did not like the paper factory. The beach and the factory are more than 20 kilometre away from the city. I do not count how many people could not answer my questions because of the language problem. I realised that I am a little bit spoiled in Helsinki, because most of the inhabitants speak English very well. I stopped this work after 4 hours and 23 minutes.
I think that I was not able today to change the project while the obstacles originated, because of the expectations which I had already in the beginning. There was a misguidance between imagination and expectation. And the second problem with one of the question was, a Finish friend told me later, that the Finish people do not like to say what they do not like, when they have to say it with their faces in front of someone. And here I am at the heart of one of my starting questions: How to diminish communication gaps, or even more how to diminish cultural communication gaps?
