It's a strange feeling to be at home two days before an important solo show opening. Normally, the exhibition weeks begin on Sunday or Monday by going to the airport and flying to some part of Europe or even further. This time the event takes place in Madrid, 120 kilometeres form here, and the installation of Syria for Dummies at Espacio Trapécio is simple though I'm sure that it will be impressive. I'm traveling to Madrid by bus tomorrow morning.

I have exhibited in Madrid very rarely. You can't say that Riiko Sakkinen "lives and works in Spain" - I just live here, since almost ten years, and work everywhere else. I don't why the curators and galleristist in Madrid haven't found my work interesting. Maybe it's because I'm an immigrant - I'm never going to be one of them but I'm neither exotic enough.

I hope that this show in Madrid changes slightly the situation. A good sign for my Spanish success was that yesterday in Talavera de la Reina a cute pharmacist - while selling me painkillers - told she is a great fan my work. It was the best medicine for my fragile self-esteem.

Nisrine wrote me from Damascus:

Syria will be fine again. The situation will be better soon because we have again a stronger political position - the ambassadors of foreign countries begin to come back. Many things are changing, we are fighting the new Syrian Constitution to be totally secular. We are dialoguing everyday about this and campaigning to support the secular thinking in Syria. The youth, the lawyers, the politicians, the artists and the activist are collaborating in this. I am so excited at the moment and working hard for this change though I receive some SMS and e-mails threating me. I don't care about that because the situation in Damascus is safe. We are also working on new initiatives against the sanctions, finding ways to use local products and create new products to replace the imports. I'm very optimistic!

Yesterday we celebrated my wife's birthday in Madrid. She had asked me to take her to opera and I got us the most expensive seats (€170 each) for Shostakovic's Lady McBeth of Mtsensk at Teatro Real.

To make the day perfect, I reserved a table in Diego Guerrero's two-Michelin-starred El Club Allard and it resulted probably the best meal of our lives. We were served scallop pastry with black garlic, mini Babybel of camembert trufeé (subtle pop food), sukiyaki, truffle with foie (this was delivered to the table with an aromatic smoke effect), Tolosa bean ravioli in a cabbage infusion (the molecular bean made us cry for the pleasure of the texture and the taste), eggs with bread and panceta with potato cream sauce, tuna from Northern Spain, rabbit taco, sacher pot with ginger, fish tank (without fish), poché egg (surprising construction in a form of a chicken egg) and chocolate croquetas.

The wines we sipped were Dr.  Burklin-Worlf Ruppetsberger 2009 (My wife wanted exclusively German whites), Martin Schaetzel Gewurtztraminer Kaefferkopf 2008 (simply amazing), Olivier Gard Vielles Vignes 2008, Perez Cruz Carmenerr Reserva 2008, Falph Fowler Mount Benson Sticky 2004 (I give 100 points) and Marques de Valdueza Vendimia Tardia 2009.

I asked the coffee to be something special too and got an molecular coffee with whisky accompanied by a chocolate cigar. Then I felt in a need of just normal coffee and brandy but having been too smart, I didn't dare to order them - but as Club Allard is very close to the perfection, the staff always knew what we wanted without pronouncing a word.

Then I got curious of a big guy eating alone and asked him if he was a food critic (though the waiter told me that the critics come much more camouflaged) but he was a broker and just liked eating alone (personally I can eat alone only in McDonald's). Anyways, Juan came to our table and we had some drinks and then continued with some Cuba libres in a bar around the corner. The staff seemed to be surprised that people were making friends in the fine dine temple just like in a biergarten.

We made it toTeatro Real two minutes before the show time and when the lights went down, I fell asleep and woke up with the final applause. The superb meal was followed by an über expensive siesta.

I had a meeting with Javier and Carlos at Espacio Trapecio to set up the details of my show Syria for Dummies which opens December 15th. I enjoy my rare visits to Madrid and try to take some time to go to see exhibitions and buy books. Now I got Zena El Khalil's Beirut, I Love You, Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Chan Koonchung's Fat Years, Wang Shuo's Please Don't Call Me Human and Sun Tzu's classic The Art of War.

The more they tell about the death of printed books, the more I buy them. I want to have a good library when real books (collection of sheets of paper bound together to hinge at one edge) disappear from the market. I don't trust in e-books, which are too easy to censor. I don't want Minitrue's Winston Smith to do on-line historical revisionism and rewrite my library. I'm going to be Luo of Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress hiding novels at a reeducation through labour camp.

Andrei Roiter was showing at Galeria Fucares some works using books and I got an idea of creating a totally new body of work: The Riiko Sakkinen Library consisting of sinister fictional books you could find in my studio. Luis promised to give me some old Bibles to paint over.

A friend asked me what is my favorite work of art. First I was thinking about pieces of my idols like Martin Kippenberger or Pablo Picasso but then I realized that the most amazing work of all the times is the Trojan Horse.

After a fruitless 10-year siege of the city of Troy, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse scuplture, and hid special operation forces inside. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek commandos crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy.

I want my works to be Trojan Horses that will be taken to every bank and corporation and then destroy the capitalism during the darkness.