This project includes two stories.

In mid-seventies, when I was still a child, people used to tell a story in Finland of how once, a long time ago, a Finnish sentence had been chosen in a competition as the most beautiful sentence in the world. 
 
“Aja hiljaa sillalla” (Drive slowly on the bridge) indeed sounds poetic; it sounds almost like Italian. The fact that nobody ever used it in daily life didn’t really matter. It was just something to be proud of.
 
In the 20th century, Finns would sometimes tell this story to foreigners whenever the topic of the Finnish language came up. I used to tell it too. I remember wondering whether the results of the competition had ever been published in other countries. Probably not, I’m sure. Only winning countries have an intrest in celebrating and glorifying these kinds of victories.
 
In the internet era, the story has taken on a second life. I have finally discoverd more about the origins of this small but not unimportant national highpoint. That peculiar competition was held at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 and, indeed, there was a competition among the languages, probably for the first and last time.
 
But surfing the internet recently, I came across something that shocked me. There are sources on internet that claim that Finland didn’t win the competition at all. It came in second place. Italy won. And nobody seems even to know what the Italian sentence was.
 
The second part of this work is an anecdote about a man in Amsterdam who had bought a bright-orange winter jacket. He told me that every time he was walking along the road, he had the feeling – he was really convinced – that motorists began driving more slowly when they saw him. They probably thought there were men at work on the road.
 
I decided to bring these two stories together. One November morning, I headed with a friend of mine to one of the approximately 1900 bridges in Amsterdam. She was wearing a bright-orange vest. I wanted to see how the motorists would react to her appearance. I asked her to try to make eye contact with the motorists while I was taking pictures. She could even mumble to herself, ’’Aja hiljaa sillalla,” if she wanted to. I was curious. It all looked promising. There was a lot of traffic. And it was busy on the bridge.