Somebody in Helsinki, around the Pasila, Käpylä, and Koskela districts, is involved in a shady propaganda campaign. It is a useful thing to observe, when we are figuring out how the battle over minds is presently fought. Performance is becoming essential for this terrain: how fast bodies move, at what rhythms or syncopation, which choreographs avoid drones, how to encrypt ingroup messaging to public expression and how bodies assemble, or demobilize. How we maintain posture and a smile, expressing anti-war (while dead).
For at least two or three years a group or a very active individual, has been putting up posters in busy street corners. Initially, they had simple comic-book-like meme content. Illustrations included racist messaging, but the texts were vague about what the demand or proposal of the campaign was. They referenced Ukrainian asylum seekers, Finnish racism and biases in refugee process. The posters expressed that people arriving from the global south would be favored over Ukrainians, and used non-existent HEKA policies as an example. The photos were stock images.
What was notable about the first series, was that every iteration of the posters used the colors of the Ukrainian flag as a background.
Recently there has been spree of new posters, but with only nonsensical texts and links to sites which don’t exist, QR codes that don’t reveal anything. The texts are nonsensical and there is no obvious visual message. It could be thought that this poster series and campaign is intended to create a sense of uncertainty in the public. In this case the amount of the posters would be the point… That they are on every lamppost and electrical cabinet. They are easy to spot because of the Ukrainian flag colors.
People routinely tear the posters down. This is something that is done by a lot of people from different backgrounds, because of the racist and weird content. There is something off putting in nonsensical texts and the layouts are deranged.
Having torn one down just now, I realized and that these posters have a stronger performance propaganda quality then I expected. They might be intended primarily for people passing by in cars! The idea could be that people driving by, moving fast will see people in tearing down posters which show the Ukrainian flag. From a distance and when passing fast, the gesture looks like removing support for Ukraine from public spaces.
This was like discovering a new species! An exiting time to be a performance artist.