Los moimoi de Fuengirola
Exhibition and research project on the Finnish identity
Serlachius Headquarters 15.6.2024—16.2.2025
Los moimoi de Fuengirola is an exhibition and research project in which artist Riiko Sakkinen (b. 1976) explores the Finnish identity.
Fuengirola, on Spain’s Costa del Sol, is home to a community of around 30,000 Finns, whose members do not bother to learn the local language or customs. They live their own semi-isolated lives, spending their time comfortably in Finnish bars and relying on their own Finnish shops, services and institutions. Indeed, the Fuengirola local government has named its municipality “Finland’s southernmost town”.
The research for the exhibition has been funded by Kone Foundation, and it produces a view of the substance of Finnishness cloaked in an anthropological guise. The curator of the exhibition is Pauli Sivonen.
INtERVIEW WITH RIIKO SAKKINEN
See the interview where artist Riiko Sakkinen and director Pauli Sivonen discuss Sakkinen’s anthropological research project and exhibition about Finnishness presented at Spain’s Costa del Sol in Fuengirola, which the Finns living there have given the nickname “Fuge”.
Riiko Sakkinen
Riiko Sakkinen is an artist, a political dissident and a one-man resistance army. He is the founder of Turborealism, an anti-capitalist art movement. An artist whose works have been comprised in Serlachius collection, he also shown his exhibitions, Closing Borders and MuNA – Museum of No Art at Serlachius.
Sakkinen was born in 1976 in Helsinki. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, graduating in 2002.He lives in Spain in Pepino, Province of Toledo since 2003.
Sakkinen has worked globally, for instance, during the Syrian Civil War in Damascus and Aleppo, in the midst of unrest in Beirut, in the time of the Mexican Drug War in Monterrey and in Kyiv while Russia bombed Ukraine.
Sakkinen has exhibited his works widely around the world including Serlachius, Mänttä, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Camden Arts Centre, London, Artipelag, Stockholm; Musac, León, Spain.
Sakkinen’s works are part of permanent collections of several internationally renowned museums. Serlachius in Mänttä comprises a wide selection of his greatest works.
Images: Riiko Sakkinen, Los moimoi de Fuengirola, 2023–2024, a detail from an installation. Photograph: Israel Galán
