cover

Whispers in the Landscape


<p><strong>Kaarin Kivirähk</strong> is the editor-in-chief of A Shade Colder.</p>


Kaarin Kivirähk


<p><em>the girliness of the wasteland, the maddening mäda</em><em><br></em><em>curling around our</em><em><br></em><em>fingers and vocal folds folding into us&nbsp;</em></p>



<p>&#8230;writes young Estonian poet Vaim Sarv, sounding like an opening rhyme to the latest issue of A Shade Colder, <em>Whispers in the Landscape</em>.&nbsp;</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--300x300.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--788x788.jpg 788w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--1013x1013.jpg 1013w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--1125x1125.jpg 1125w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--1350x1350.jpg 1350w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--1800x1800.jpg 1800w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--1969x1969.jpg 1969w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/illu_nr3-vaike--scaled.jpg 2560w" data-sizes="auto" width="2560" height="2560" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Illustration: Martina Gofman and Johanna Ruukholm, <em>Whispers in the Landscape</em>, 2022</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>The last issue for 2022 is published in late November, a few weeks after many people in the world celebrate their adaptations of the Day of the Dead. In Estonian mythology, the months of October and November have been known as the time of the souls when the spirits of dead relatives would come to visit the families they once had. Nowadays, the pagan tradition has modestly shrunk to just lighting up a candle on the window, so the dead can find their way. However, the time of the souls still marks the beginning of the darkest and coldest time of the year. It is a grim reminder that the natural conditions in which we live have more power over us than maybe we would like to acknowledge. The mild whispers in the landscape are moulding the culture, the subconsciousness and the identity of the people that inhabit the land.</p>



<p>This is even more apparent in the growing energy crisis, which threatens to or already has left us in an even deeper darkness this winter. In her article, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė draws attention to the shared experience of the vulnerability and instability of the technological infrastructure in the region, from the Baltics to Ukraine, where the fragility of the once progress-oriented power networks and transport infrastructure has become awfully apparent after Russia’s invasion in February.&nbsp;</p>



<p>On another note, Natalia Sielewicz and Alison M. Gingeras summarise the Eastern European understanding of nature and landscape, where mythical sirens, small devils, spirited animals and skeletons wander the magical forests and demonic marshes. They offer a revisionist reading of Symbolist art from Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states, where artists have engaged with specific regional landscapes and common mythologies.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p>Vaida Stepanovaite writes about artists Sandra Kosorotova, Marija Nemcenko and Anna Ceipe, who have been working with plants in their recent work. Nemcenko and Kosorotova have both made works in connection with fireweed, which carries many cultural meanings and identities. The cultural identity formed by nature and landscape is explored in Keiu Krikmann’s essay on Estonian design and applied arts, while Kärt Ojavee introduces the impact of algae in the local culture and her artistic practice. What might designers and artists use as their materials in the unpredictable future?&nbsp;</p>



<p>The newest addition to A Shade Colder is the podcast <em>Majickk Sound, </em>hosted by Marika Agu, on contemporary sound art. The first podcast tackles the landscape of Estonian sound art together with artist John Grzinich. </p>



<p>Estonian painter Kristi Kongi, who is having a show in November at the Tartu Art House, has often stressed her affection for the dark time of the year. This fact is peculiar as Kongi is known for her very colourful paintings and immersive installations, which are anything but dark and grey. However, she states that darkness provides her mental space to ponder and analyse her thoughts. If anything, the upcoming winter provides us all with this much-needed space for reflection, and this issue provokes some ideas that may have been waiting to be processed during the darker seasons.</p>


illu_nr3 väike

Editorial. Whispers in the Landscape


<p><strong>Vaim Sarv</strong> is a folk musician and experimental vocalist. Her rituals combine free improvisation with noise and ancient Finno-Ugric folk song. Using portable, consumer-grade electronics and extended vocal technique, he worships spaces with unconventional acoustics and queer senses of place.</p>


Vaim Sarv


<h2 class="wp-block-heading">●</h2>



<p>rocks have been embedded into my palm<br>by a cliff as a reminder<br>of my closeness to death<br></p>



<p>you see, i had been callously combing<br>through squirreltrack and leafstem<br>shalehead and dustprint<br>for a round opening<br>a promise of darkness and disappearance<br>of refuge from vigilance both<br>human and digital<br></p>



<p>having scoured the walls<br>with my eyelids and toes<br>i was still blind and so proceeded<br>to scamper upwards<br>over swollen veins<br>and tectonic tissue<br></p>



<p>vertically hurtling<br>i glued my body<br>to every stone, particle and branch<br>breathlessly whispering<br>thank you<br>to everyone i disturbed<br></p>



<p>and then<br>i came to know<br>my closeness to death<br>in just one life moment<br>the cliff warned me<br>in a tongue more succinct than feeling<br>that if i moved one step closer<br>i would be killed<br></p>



<p>frozen i fell<br>onto all fours<br>and so proceeded<br>to lower myself down<br></p>



<p>back to the ground<br>i fell and finally felt<br>my hands heavy<br>and chest compressed<br></p>



<p>bruised and bloody<br>broken by violent intimacy<br>i faltered haltingly<br>towards a now grateful grief</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2.png" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-209x300.png 209w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-714x1024.png 714w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-550x788.png 550w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-707x1013.png 707w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-785x1125.png 785w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-942x1350.png 942w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-1256x1800.png 1256w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2-1374x1969.png 1374w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3402_2.png 1500w" data-sizes="auto" width="1500" height="2150" alt="" class="lazyload"/><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p></p>



<p></p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignright"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds.png" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-209x300.png 209w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-714x1024.png 714w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-550x788.png 550w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-707x1013.png 707w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-785x1125.png 785w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-942x1350.png 942w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-1256x1800.png 1256w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds-1374x1969.png 1374w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/two_worlds.png 1500w" data-sizes="auto" width="1500" height="2150" alt="" class="lazyload"/><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p></p>



<p></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">dear platform</h2>



<p><em>for anette, sanna, and fred</em></p>



<p>the girliness of the wasteland<br>the maddening mäda<br>curling around our<br>fingers and vocal folds<br>folding into us&nbsp;<br>holding us and the rot<br>the stench the pink umami excretions<br>the drop and the drip<br>of the cables all bunched up<br>around the thighs studded flashing<br>uploading and held up bound in<br>outbound and unbounded</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2-.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2--150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2--225x300.jpg 225w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2--768x1024.jpg 768w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2--591x788.jpg 591w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2--760x1013.jpg 760w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2--844x1125.jpg 844w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2--1013x1350.jpg 1013w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3488_2-.jpg 1200w" data-sizes="auto" width="1200" height="1600" alt="" class="lazyload"/><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>the crash</p>



<p>and the melt</p>



<p>the severed strands of unceasing relentless commands and<br>the sweat on your brow<br>the perspiration and damp of a constant plan<br>sidestepping and laughing off to the side&nbsp;<br>i side ways and sideways fall on the sharpened blade<br>of that communal swamp<br>that is always no matter what and when<br>unendingly tending to us</p>



<p>rain boots on we toddle and splash spraying<br>with the utmost most caring and gentle disregard<br>for the watching faces we unfaithfully face and<br>deface via the wrong path we continue to forget we took</p>



<p>dear platform<br>now that i’ve dragged you down to the river and<br>now that we’ve both escaped the tangled center<br>that cavernous carnivorous carnal center<br>that sad and lonely data center<br>now that i’ve held you down and listened to the sound of<br>your eyes fluttering shut and the timbre of your voice change<br>and now that we’re both a bit less lonely in that hardcore white european way<br>i’d like to let go of the plot and the fear<br>of the non-fact that letting go of means losing (the plot)</p>



<p>i’d like to let go of you with the knowledge<br>that you’ll be back tomorrow dear platform<br>i’d like to set you afloat let you drift in the river</p>



<p>dear platform<br>now that we’ve finally touched</p>



<p></p>



<p></p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block aligncenter"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847-225x300.jpg 225w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847-591x788.jpg 591w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847-760x1013.jpg 760w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847-844x1125.jpg 844w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847-1013x1350.jpg 1013w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3847.jpg 1200w" data-sizes="auto" width="1200" height="1600" alt="" class="lazyload"/><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignright"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364-225x300.jpg 225w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364-591x788.jpg 591w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364-760x1013.jpg 760w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364-844x1125.jpg 844w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364-1013x1350.jpg 1013w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3364.jpg 1200w" data-sizes="auto" width="1200" height="1600" alt="" class="lazyload"/><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">●</h2>



<p>until further notice<br>celebrate everything<br>said a sign on a house separated in many ways<br>from the technological workers <br>a facebook fortress&nbsp;<br>and the salt farms<br>&nbsp;<br>i placed this instruction inside me<br>and crossed a final threshold<br>into an openly grey area<br>it was clear to my sensory organs<br>that ”humans” had only recently started <br>”caring” for this place</p>



<p>&nbsp;<br>moving past emptiness and habitat <br>i came to an edge delineated<br>by water and fence<br>and found 3 black cats&nbsp;<br>siblings, with 6 yellow eyes<br>&nbsp;<br>they were hiding from the rain <br>under wood fibre and plastic <br>that someone had arranged&nbsp;<br><br>miles from any dwelling<br>their dry and precarious presence <br>lunged at me&nbsp;<br></p>



<p>wounded by shared fragility <br>gazes tenuously locked<br>we celebrated everything<br>&nbsp;</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958-225x300.jpg 225w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958-591x788.jpg 591w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958-760x1013.jpg 760w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958-844x1125.jpg 844w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958-1013x1350.jpg 1013w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_3958.jpg 1200w" data-sizes="auto" width="1200" height="1600" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>All images by Vaim Sarv</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>


IMG_3387

the girliness of the wasteland


<p><strong>Natalia Sielewicz</strong> is an art historian and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In her exhibitions and essays, she addresses the issues of feminism, affect culture, biopolitics, and technology. Her latest curatorial exhibitions include <em>Fedir Tetyanych. The Neverending Eye</em> (2022), <em>The Dark Arts. Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism of the East and North</em> (2022, co-curated together with Alison Gingeras). She is a member of Sunflower Solidarity Centre at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Soniakh Digest collective.</p>


Natalia Sielewicz


<p><strong>Alison M. Gingeras</strong> is a curator and writer.Currently she serves as an adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary and a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, and works independently. In 2021, she curated two monographic exhibitions devoted to Polish born artists of the twentieth century: <em>My Name is Maryan</em> at MOCA Miami and <em>Erna Rosenstein: Once Upon a Time </em>at Hauser &amp; Wirth in New York City.</p>


Alison M. Gingeras


<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-214x300.jpg 214w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-732x1024.jpg 732w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-563x788.jpg 563w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-724x1013.jpg 724w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-804x1125.jpg 804w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-964x1350.jpg 964w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-1286x1800.jpg 1286w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-1407x1969.jpg 1407w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-90_oczy-w-lesie-scaled.jpg 1829w" data-sizes="auto" width="1829" height="2560" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Aleksandra Waliszewska. 2017. Gouache on paper.</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>A version of this text was published as part of a longer essay accompanying the exhibition <em>The</em> <em>Dark Arts</em>. <em>Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism from the East and</em> <em>North</em> at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Bringing together over 200 works by 42 artists from Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, and the Baltic states, this exhibition unpacked Waliszewska’s unusual, intensive dialogue with the <em>fin-de-siècle</em> Symbolist movement, particularly focusing on the culturally-specific subjects she shares with her Eastern and Northern predecessors. Like her Symbolist forbears, Waliszewska’s art is invested in the metaphorical meanings behind her visual narratives, allowing her to dissect the complexities of the human condition. The exhibition’s transhistorical dialogue aimed to offer a deeper context to Waliszewska’s preoccupation with mythological tropes, apocalyptic scenarios, and charged Balto-Slavic landscapes.</p>



<p><em>The Dark Arts</em> proposed a revisionist reading of the <em>fin-de-siècle</em>, a shift in the art historical canon from the dominance of largely French and Austrian artists towards a more expansive consideration of the Symbolist legacy. In Western Europe, the advent of Symbolism – dubbed ”the art of ideas&#8221;<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="1" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-1">1</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-1" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="1">Körner, H. 2020. <em>Meaning as Sound: On Symbolism as a European Phenomenon</em>, in <em>Decadence and Dark Dreams: Belgian Symbolism</em> (ed. Gleis, R). Berlin: Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,p. 34</span> – was fuelled by a collective fascination with ”self-identification of communities and persons, which emerges from the relations to the soil, water, and one another.&#8221;<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="2" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-2">2</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-2" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="2"><em>Ibid</em>.</span> As the movement’s influence spread to Eastern and Northern regions, artists infused this general interest in esoterica with indigenous literary, spiritual, mystic, and folkloric traditions, creating alternative incarnations of Symbolism outside the Western canon’s hegemony.</p>



<p>With the Symbolist movement’s emphasis on liberating creative expression, we gain insight into the complex intermingling of art, identity, and indigeneity. The latter is a term that may be understood as the ”self-identification of communities and persons, which emerges from the relations to the soil, water, and one another.&#8221;<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="3" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-3">3</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-3" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="3">Shestakova, S. 2021. The heterogeneous Temporalities of Russia’s Colonialism, <em>Parse Journal </em>13.2, summer 2021. Available at: https://parsejournal.com/ article/the-heterogeneous-temporalities-of-russias-colonialism/.</span>The mythologised yet non-homogeneous east remained primarily agrarian, in contrast to heavily urbanised Western European cities of the period, where industrialisation precipitated particular social organisation, engendering the infamous <em>fin-de-siècle</em> decadence. Resistance across the East to a similar mass urbanisation came from the persistence of the feudal landholding system and from serfdom, which had been enforced since the early 14th century. In Eastern Europe, the peasant class made up most of the population: over 80 per cent at the beginning of the 20th century, with up to 90 per cent in some areas, and a correspondingly small urban bourgeoisie. Urbanisation progressed heterogeneously, while on the peripheries of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires, ethnic and class tensions shifted constantly.</p>



<p>Despite these demographic shifts and transformations, folk traditions persisted in songs, legends, and crafts animating cultural collectives and artistic endeavours, while at the core of the Balto-Slavic symbolist imaginary, the anxiety-ridden landscape spread, with its supernatural inhabitants. Regional Slavic cosmologies, where magic often merged with reality, consider woodlands places of holy worship. Religious rites were performed among birches, oaks, and willows, while felling a sacred tree was a great sin and misfortune. These cosmologies created the backdrop to multi-ethnic religious practices syncretising Christianity, Islam, and Judaism with cycles of nature and countryside deities. Forest and swamp formed a vernacular space in the common imaginary, as described in historian Kate Brown’s analysis of merging physical and magical landscapes across multi-ethnic borderlands comprising today’s Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine in the period shortly before the Bolshevik revolution: ”Unclean forces [&#8230;] took the form of spirits of the house, the stream, forest, and swamp, as well as of the walking dead.”<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="4" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-4">4</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-4" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="4">Brown, K. 2009. <em>A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. </em>Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ebook, loc. 943.</span></p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-300x214.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-1024x730.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-1106x788.jpg 1106w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-1421x1013.jpg 1421w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-1578x1125.jpg 1578w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-1894x1350.jpg 1894w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-2525x1800.jpg 2525w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-2762x1969.jpg 2762w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-110_111_holoc-new-scaled.jpg 2560w" data-sizes="auto" width="2560" height="1825" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Aleksandra Waliszewska. 2017. Gouache on paper.</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>Sirens, skeletons, reptilian femme fatales<em>, </em>zombies, and other lost souls: in Waliszewska’s oeuvre, the swamp and forest is a tense, enigmatic space, inhabited by a supernatural bestiary, where unusual encounters between life and death occur. In this Hades-esque universe, even the landscape plays an important role: it reciprocates our gaze, becoming an active participant in the ongoing process of decay. Its psychedelic, secretive atmosphere conveys a sense of impending catastrophe. Yet muddy slime is also where desires are fulfilled. In folktales and popular novellas, wetlands predominate as a motif with demonic connotations. Bogs, marshes, and quagmires, with their spatial poetics, were traditionally believed to be dangerous, ambiguous places. Marshes were thought to be terrain that was unclean, empty, and useless, which seems to be an effect of the pragmatism of farmers even into the 20th century, who saw these undeveloped stretches as the antithesis of arable land.</p>



<p>One could argue that these swampy, forested borderlands became a highly mythologised site over the centuries because of their ungovernability. Although primordial Eastern European forests and swamps have resisted Soviet agrarian reforms and capitalist development alike, these unruly reserves have never been neutral geographic locations. Swamps and forests evolved into mourning sites, infused with meaning: silent witnesses to the ethnic cleansing of Jewish and Romani minorities, to the sexual terror of war victims, to the military displacement of indigenous populations across the bloodlands between Russia and Germany, as the historian Timothy Snyder has termed this territory during the Second World War, where uncounted graveyards testify to that and other wars that passed over its wild frontiers. In our day, the Slavic forest and swamp, with its holy sites, wood nymphs, and spirits, has become a charged landscape on which military and paramilitary violence is being enacted, where grassroots activists and paramedics search the Białowieża forest reserve for refugees at peril, stranded by legal protocols along the Polish-Belarusian border.<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="5" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-5">5</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-5" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="5">Since September 2021, a strip on this border of about 40 kilometres has been turned into the site of an unfolding humanitarian crisis. An unconfirmed number of displaced people (mostly from the middle east and Sub-Saharan Africa) are being subjugated to illegal pushbacks by the authorities in Belarus and Poland and prevented from moving in any direction. stranded in national-forest reserves that straddle the border, these refugees lack access to food, water, medical aid, and clothes to protect them from inclement conditions. On 2 September, the Polish government declared the border a ”state of exception,” restricting NGOs offering relief and journalists from entering the area; a metal wall of almost two hundred kilometres was begun in January 2022.</span>There, as a space of otherness evading the dominant logic, things can become a metaphor for resistance, or can fall prey to reactionary, Pan-Slavic nationalism.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-300x215.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-1024x734.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-1100x788.jpg 1100w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-1414x1013.jpg 1414w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-1570x1125.jpg 1570w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-1884x1350.jpg 1884w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-2512x1800.jpg 2512w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-2748x1969.jpg 2748w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/katalog-s.-92_93_topienie-2-scaled.jpg 2560w" data-sizes="auto" width="2560" height="1835" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Aleksandra Waliszewska. 2011. Gouache on paper.</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>Waliszewska’s work meanders through these tricky realms, never falling into didactic literalism. As with her Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Baltic Symbolist forebears, Waliszewska’s work engages specific regional landscapes and topographies, and the common mythologies that fuelled Symbolism’s incarnations in Eastern and Baltic countries. Primeval forests, murky swamps, and agrarian landscapes with identifiable Slavic hallmarks appear as backdrops for Waliszewska’s figures, and are key protagonists in her narrative compositions. echoing the foreboding fairy-tale landscapes of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, the Lithuanian master, and spooky Latvian forests recurring in Rihards Zariņš’ oeuvre, Waliszewska embraces a symbolist insistence on specificity, and on the power of indigenous landscapes, in her resolutely identifiable Balto-Slavic settings.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-300x223.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-1024x761.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-1060x788.jpg 1060w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-1362x1013.jpg 1362w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-1513x1125.jpg 1513w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-1816x1350.jpg 1816w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-2421x1800.jpg 2421w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-2648x1969.jpg 2648w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ciurlionis_-scaled.jpg 2560w" data-sizes="auto" width="2560" height="1903" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. Fairy Tale (Fairy Tale of the Castle). 1909. Tempera on cardboard. MK Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas.</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>But unlike her predecessors from the previously partitioned and colonised lands of the East and North, Waliszewska does not infuse her paintings with mythical heroes and romantic folklore. Though imbued with poetic symbolism, hers are not the ordinary landschafts. There is something indisputably contemporary and uncanny in her enchanted landscapes: a gothic, a glitch, a shadow area between fear and ecstasy. One is almost tempted to think of these swampy forests as an offshore formation, through the concept of black shoals, proposed by Tiffany Lethabo King, who used this term as a metaphor and mode of critique to theorise the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. As she writes, ”Black shoals’ unpredictability exceeds full knowability/ mappability and in some senses it is what Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick would call a ‘demonic’ space. Because the shoal’s shape, expanse, and density change over time, the shoal is as much a dynamic and moving set of processes and ecological relations as it is a longitudinal and latitudinal coordinate that cartographers attempt to fix in time and space.”<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="6" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-6">6</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1353-6" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="6">Lethabo King, T. 2019. <em>The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies</em>. Duke University Press, p. 3.</span></p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen-300x201.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen-1024x686.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen-1176x788.jpg 1176w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen-1511x1013.jpg 1511w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen-1678x1125.jpg 1678w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen-2014x1350.jpg 2014w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Kittelsen.jpg 2375w" data-sizes="auto" width="2375" height="1592" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Theodor Kittelsen. The Water Sprite. 1904. Ink, watercolour, pencil and crayon on paper. The National Museum in Oslo.</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>


katalog s. 90_oczy w lesie

Demonic spaces and offshore formations – Alexandra Waliszewska and Balto-Slavic landscapes


<p><strong>Dr Eglė Rindzevičiūtė</strong> is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology, the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, Kingston University London, the UK. Her current research interests involve the intellectual history and sociology of governance of complexity, particularly the emergence of global environmental governance and the digitality, the shifting forms of scientific expertise in public policy, as well as material culture of Cold War science and technology and its heritigisation. She is the author of The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (Cornell University Press, 2016) and The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science (Cornell University Press, forthcoming in 2023).</p>


Eglė Rindzevičiūtė


<p>More than a century ago, modernist artists visualised the emerging body politic, where the social was fashioned into novel shapes in concrete, steel and glass and motored into the future by land, sea and air vehicles. Yet the fit of infrastructure and the social was uneasy: throughout the twentieth century, the social body grew in bursts, spilling over in its exuberance, bulging where it was not meant to, elsewhere shrinking, leaving the shell empty. The old infrastructure could not keep up with the accelerating metabolism: being stiff and eventually rusty, it scarred the social, grew into its crevices and made it stumble, restricting its movement with a tight corset of the past dreams. What was meant to be a backbone became a bother. What used to be shiny armour began to resemble an ingrown nail.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block aligncenter"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BURIAL_20220117_NEW_EDIT_05.00_31_12_00.Still007.png" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BURIAL_20220117_NEW_EDIT_05.00_31_12_00.Still007-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BURIAL_20220117_NEW_EDIT_05.00_31_12_00.Still007-300x162.png 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BURIAL_20220117_NEW_EDIT_05.00_31_12_00.Still007-1024x554.png 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BURIAL_20220117_NEW_EDIT_05.00_31_12_00.Still007-1400x757.png 1400w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BURIAL_20220117_NEW_EDIT_05.00_31_12_00.Still007.png 1500w" data-sizes="auto" width="1500" height="811" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Emilija Škarnulytė, <em>Burial</em>, 2022. Video still</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>In the 2000s, European integration spurred infrastructure growth, expecting to bind East and West societies more closely. Infrastructures, like pieces of titanium used in surgery, were to join the bones of entrepreneurship, to weld the landscapes of creativity, forging new transnational selves that know no boundaries, but why do these late modern selves keep disaggregating in our gaze? The blurring effect is part of perceiving what Timothy Morton described as hyperobjects.<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="1" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049-1">1</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049-1" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="1">Morton, T. 2013. <em>Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.</span> It is from blurring that different epistemologies emerge to help us explain and cope with loss. As Carlo Rovelli put it, commenting on Ludwig Boltzmann’s theory, ”the entropy exists [only – E.R.] because we describe the world in a blurred fashion”.<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="2" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049-2">2</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049-2" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="2">Rovelli, C. 2018. <em>The Order of Time</em>. London: Penguin, 30. </span> There is no loss, no disintegration before a singular observation is made, leading to a mistaken impression that what is being observed is the grammar of things. However, this particular configuration of order is merely the effect of partial optics that have left the rest of the universe lurking in a blur.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignright"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/smallsmall_gates_black.jpeg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/smallsmall_gates_black-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/smallsmall_gates_black-300x256.jpeg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/smallsmall_gates_black-1024x872.jpeg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/smallsmall_gates_black-925x788.jpeg 925w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/smallsmall_gates_black.jpeg 1155w" data-sizes="auto" width="1155" height="984" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Agnė Gintalaitė, <em>Beauty Remains</em>, 2015</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>We focus and refocus on the blurred infrastructures responding to unexpected events. The last few months have made it clear just how much vulnerability has been confined to the blurred-zone by the progress-oriented narratives of technological futures. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 exploited the vulnerability of the power networks using transport infrastructure to move military units, targeting energy generators and dams with missiles. Even nuclear facilities were not spared. Everything considered impossible in the world of safety norms and international agreements became possible with the shelling of the Kharkiv nuclear research reactor and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, with the ruptured NordStream II, spitting gas into the Baltic Sea, resembling Anish Kapoor’s inverted fountain (<em>Descension</em>, 2014). Like a whirlpool, the future itself sometimes appears to be sucked into the hypothetical present, for instance, where the RAND war game on Russia (2014–2015) invading the Baltic states showed that occupation would be fast – the speed of invasion facilitated not only by the small territories, but also by the excellent road network, the result of three decades of intensive development since 1990. Maybe road and rail are not belts but whirlpools.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers.png" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers-300x264.png 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers-1024x900.png 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers-897x788.png 897w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers-1153x1013.png 1153w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers-1281x1125.png 1281w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers-1537x1350.png 1537w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers-2049x1800.png 2049w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Textile_workers.png 2156w" data-sizes="auto" width="2156" height="1894" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Alexander Deineka, <em>Textile Workers</em>, 1927</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>However, the ingrown infrastructures emerge from the blur as they enter the cultural imaginaries of industrial landscapes, which are ambivalent in the Baltic states. The socialist realist canon glorified the infrastructure’s finite nature, rational form, and highly synchronised flow resulting in a perfect cosmos of machines, production lines and humans (Alexander Deineka, <em>Textile Workers</em>, 1927). This crystal-clear official vision was disturbed by the blur both literally and metaphorically, where painters merged expressionist and cubist forms to disturb the clear shapes and complete visions by presenting humans as fragmented, entropic figures in the dysfunctional contexts of cities, factories and machinery (Vincas Kisarauskas, <em>Figures Without a Future</em>, 1976).&nbsp;</p>



<p>The Ukrainian last stand in Azovstal, the industrial steelwork city within the city of Mariupol, is the ultimate expression of the grandeur, drama and tragedy of the post-Soviet industrial lifeworld. Unlike in Ukraine, where both national and industrial narratives are cast in an ultimate heroic form commanding global attention, the cultural imaginaries of the Baltic industrial infrastructure, its failures and securitisation consist of rather small stories, being, thankfully, unmarked by large, distinct catastrophes. The echoes of the big and global stories, the big drama, are carried by isotopes in the bodies of the Baltic workforce sent to Chornobyl: over 17,000 Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian men were sent to clean up Chornobyl between 1986 and 1991. This generation is ageing; their memory is at risk of loss. The more visible remnants are the toxic architectures of the piles of oil shale in Estonia and the mountains of phosphogypsum in Lithuania. The turbulent refurbishment and expansion of Soviet cities generated quiet landfills of industrial waste – plastic window frames, concrete and asbestos. Anna Storm called such places ”landscape scars,” where society and nature come together to resolve and heal the ruptures caused by twentieth-century industrialisation.&nbsp;<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="3" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049-3">3</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1049-3" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="3">Storm, A. 2014. <em>Post-Industrial Landscape Scars</em>. Basingstoke: Palgrave.</span></p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block aligncenter"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-scaled.jpeg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-300x200.jpeg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-1024x683.jpeg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-1182x788.jpeg 1182w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-1520x1013.jpeg 1520w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-1688x1125.jpeg 1688w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-2025x1350.jpeg 2025w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-2700x1800.jpeg 2700w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-2954x1969.jpeg 2954w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Serapinas-scaled.jpeg 2560w" data-sizes="auto" width="2560" height="1707" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Augustas Serapinas, <em>Vygintas, Kirilas and Semionovas</em>, 2018. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maardu.jpeg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maardu-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maardu-235x300.jpeg 235w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maardu-804x1024.jpeg 804w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maardu-618x788.jpeg 618w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maardu-795x1013.jpeg 795w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maardu-883x1125.jpeg 883w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maardu.jpeg 981w" data-sizes="auto" width="981" height="1250" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Jonathan Lovekin, <em>Maardu IX</em>, 2003. From <em>Infra</em>&#8211; series, 2015–2017</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>The Baltic industrial dramas are more like a TV series with many episodes than feature films: the misfortunes and tragedies could appear rather small, but they add up and form a chain of infrastructural injustices that need to be reconstructed to be recognised for what they are. In Lithuania, the best living memorial to the suffering of the industrialised countryside is the cow – or a horse – chained to a spot in the field, a witness of property relations that were destabilised in the communist period, where farmers were not bothered to plant hedges or build fences to enable animals to graze freely.</p>



<p>Post-Soviet art turned to the fragile, post-utilitarian image of infrastructure witnessing failed Soviet modernisation. The crumbling concrete from the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant communicates its archaeological, fossilised value (Augustas Serapinas, <em>Vygintas, Kirilas and Semionovas</em>, 2018). Others, like Emilija Škarnulytė, find order in disorder, rejecting the entropic effect of the blurred vision by filming industrial infrastructures in such a way that they appear as seductive, living, organic environments (Emilija Škarnulytė, <em>Burial</em>, 2022). In the industrial landscapes, nature becomes ”the negative form” of industrial infrastructure, reclaiming its punctuated, incoherent and painfully mundane spatiality through vegetation, fog, snow and rain (Jonathan Lovekin’s series, <em>Infra-</em>, 2015–2017). A hyper-macro lens on the industrial infrastructure rehabilitates it as an object of the modernist aesthetic: in Agnė Gintalaitė’s photographs the weathered doors of Soviet garages grow layers of patina becoming canvases of expressionist painting, but the painter is the hostile Baltic weather (Agnė Gintalaitė, <em>Beauty Remains</em>, 2015).</p>



<p>Not only the communist regime but also that of neoliberal capitalism has scarred the Baltic countryside. In the last decades, the most visible form of everyday geo-extractionism in the region is sand and gravel quarries. Entrepreneurs buy plots of land – usually abandoned agricultural fields – to extract materials for the booming construction business. To observe a quarry being born is something to behold. First, the topsoil is ploughed to break up the roots of tall, established grasses, which hitherto had hosted migrating crane, as well as hare and roe deer. The topsoil is peeled off and sold to garden centres, so that city residents can pot their house plants. Then, gravel is dug and transported by diesel-thirsty lorries, roaring their engines through the woods and fields, now scarred with purpose-built roads. Once the gravel is exhausted, the military may move in to train battle action in those complex terrains. The entrepreneur will remediate the site by returning it to its natural condition. The topsoil, however, is gone forever, relegated to the blur, whereas those new pavements in town centres, roads and bridges are in sharp focus as symbols of growth – or, shall we say, the new forms of ingrowth?</p>


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Ingrown infrastructures


<p><strong>Vaida Stepanovaite</strong> is a curator, organiser, editor, and writer whose practice is emerging in relation to the affective legacies of the European post-socialist region. Currently she is the Editor in Chief and Head of Organisation at Artnews.lt, Lithuania. Vaida is undertaking practice-based doctoral research at Goldsmiths, London, looking into how the tensions between the institutive, the radical, and the communal drive self-organised resistance in the contemporary visual art field.</p>


Vaida Stepanovaite


<p>&#8230;a small story opens up to become a more extensive one. A recount from a conversation sparked in passing, a tidbit of text, a flicker of video having already disappeared into the bottomless feed. Not much else is needed sometimes; I myself prefer such fragments that get stuck in my eye or my ear, tangled in my hair, like a flying seed carrying its plural story of origin.</p>



<p>This small wondering [here] sprouts not unlike such a seed, into the work of three Baltic women artists, Sandra Kosorotova, Anna Ceipe, and Marija Nemčenko, all of whom I had wonderfully different encounters with – full of exciting stories and tidbits – throughout the year. Their practices take root in the imaginaries of their regional landscapes and are migratory in and through them, along the poetic routes of vegetal ancestral drifts. The latter are not unlike what we call continental drifts; the processes of shifting, rotating, crashing, leaking, ripping and spurting that once broke up the Earth’s super-formations and created fragments now held together by intertwined flows.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-1024x684.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-1180x788.jpg 1180w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-1517x1013.jpg 1517w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-1684x1125.jpg 1684w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-2021x1350.jpg 2021w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-2695x1800.jpg 2695w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-2948x1969.jpg 2948w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela1-scaled.jpg 2560w" data-sizes="auto" width="2560" height="1710" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Marija Nemčenko, exhibition view at Swallow gallery, 2022. Photo: Laurynas Skeisgiela</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>Vegetal ancestral drifts – a mouthful but quite a useful formulation – appear in these artists’ practices as poignant critiques of the misarticulated myths of origin and belonging, of hindered motions and identities. Unbeknownst to each other, Marija Nemčenko and Sandra Kosorotova have been kindling a shared interest in fireweed – a fast-spreading, mid-summer-blooming, fluffy-seeded weed dubbed <em>invasive</em>. An intruder plant that feels comfortable in barren soil, made such by the promises of human progress – clanking industrial tools, laying railway tracks, spinning concrete mixers and oil barrels, hands sowing fire.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignright"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-213x300.jpg 213w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-726x1024.jpg 726w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-559x788.jpg 559w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-718x1013.jpg 718w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-797x1125.jpg 797w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-957x1350.jpg 957w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-1276x1800.jpg 1276w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-1396x1969.jpg 1396w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Marija-Nemcenko-exhibition-view-at-Swallow-gallery-2022.-Photo_-Laurynas-Skeisgiela-1-scaled.jpg 1815w" data-sizes="auto" width="1815" height="2560" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Marija Nemčenko, exhibition view at Swallow gallery, 2022. Photo: Laurynas Skeisgiela</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>In her last exhibition<em> In the Hands of Our Eclectic Physicians,</em> which I curated this summer at the Swallow project space in Vilnius, Lithuania, Marija asked how curious it is for a plant to be placed in the pejorative human category of being <em>invasive</em> or <em>alien</em>; how to address the woes of a global agro-industrial complex (explored in objects resembling the architecture of local makeshift markets), and what would change if we stopped categorising non-human entities through human subjectivity and allowed them their own agency? This is a wide-reaching ontological question extending beyond this short text, but we could still ask it in such a way – how do plants become exposed to cultural conditioning, whether as a form of empowerment, or as a tool inscribing nation-state and identity politics?&nbsp;</p>



<p>Fireweed is placed exactly on this double-edged sword, as in the post-Soviet region it goes by another name – <em>Ivan Chai</em>, or Ivan’s tea in Russian. Its cultural properties have been accumulated and tooled to an extent that the Russian war-mongerer recently ordered the (Western) Coca-Cola production plants standing idle in Russia due to the company’s exit from the country, to be re-ignited for the mass-manufacture and dissemination of <em>Ivan Chai.</em></p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video.png" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video-300x196.png 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video-1024x669.png 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video-1205x788.png 1205w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video-1550x1013.png 1550w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video-1721x1125.png 1721w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video-2065x1350.png 2065w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video.png 2362w" data-sizes="auto" width="2362" height="1544" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Sandra Kosorotova. Can I Grow Here, 2022. Still from the video</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>Tallinn-based Sandra Kosorotova has been cultivating a similar albeit hyperlocal discussion of <em>invasive</em> and <em>alien</em> species, and differential cultural and geopolitical identities in Estonia, a country where no less than a third of the population, while being of multiple ethnicities and nationalities, is nevertheless Russian speaking. Fireweed has been deeply explored in her work as a plant unwelcome in native ecologies bringing with it forgotten healing and nutritional properties.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Sandra has recently expanded on this narrative in her short film <em>Can I Grow Here</em> exhibited at the Artishok Biennale in the Tallinn Botanic Gardens. The film is a three-language dialogue conducted in Estonian, Russian and English, involving bright yellow bushy weeds – colloquially known as <em>Rakvere raibe</em> or <em>venekapsas</em> in Estonian (Russian cabbage) – and the city’s most populous district of Lasnamäe, its resident majority speaking Russian and its landscape marked by socialist high-rise apartment blocks and chain link fences. A district segregated culturally and socioeconomically, Lasnamäe at some point in time lost its free access to the neighbouring botanical gardens (the very same) when a paywalled fence was built around it, which was not problematic to the same extent for the inhabitants of a neighbouring district of wealthier house owners. A garden guarding the <em>exotic</em> imported flora of the world and expelling the invasive <em>Rakvere raibe</em> and other uninvited guests. A microcosmos of disrupted belonging, of dis-belonging, of the troubled sense of a name when the world is swirling around.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block aligncenter"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1.png" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1-300x197.png 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1-1024x673.png 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1-1200x788.png 1200w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1-1542x1013.png 1542w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1-1713x1125.png 1713w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1-2055x1350.png 2055w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Sandra-Kosorotova.-Can-I-Grow-Here.-2022.-Still-from-the-video1.png 2360w" data-sizes="auto" width="2360" height="1550" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Sandra Kosorotova. Can I Grow Here, 2022. Still from the video</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-300x216.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1024x737.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1094x788.jpg 1094w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1407x1013.jpg 1407w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1563x1125.jpg 1563w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1875x1350.jpg 1875w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/13-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo.jpg 2500w" data-sizes="auto" width="2500" height="1800" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Anna Ceipe, exhibition view at Hoib gallery, 2022. Photo Roman-Sten Tõnissoo</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>What’s in a name, asks Sandra, ”a rose is a rose is a rose, a human, a plant, a monster or a plant-human?”, articulating the entangled nature of things and gesturing towards the cultural seeding of knowledge and its borders. What’s in a name, asks Marija of the <em>invasive</em> fireweed, weed-of-fire. What’s in a name, asks Latvian artist Anna Ceipe, who this autumn had an exhibition at Hoib gallery located in a basement in Tallinn. A curious arrangement of shipping and scenting devices, the exhibition traces stories of origin, from the intimate to the universalized. It studies the naming and archiving of flora or the science of classification that started with scribblings in the <em>exotic</em> journals of white men in the early 1800s. Coincidentally (but not really), as the voice in Sandra’s video tells us, the understanding of <em>alien</em> was introduced after the mid-18th century. Establishing the <em>invasive other</em> requires the original lines to be drawn, identities established and sealed. These become troubled when the Latvian Museum of Natural History is replenished with plant species from South Africa somehow found in Latvia. Could this be the work of some vegetal ancestral drift?</p>



<p>Anna’s exhibition,<em> Notes from the Floating Ground</em>, included a glass vessel crafted in the waning tradition of Soviet Latvian glass-blowing (a highly collectible craft, I was told), holding within itself the aroma of the Latvian seaside, where the artist’s grandparents reside. The scent of her grandmother’s spice trade with sailors, damp wooden ship boards, storage containers exchanging hands; there is no way of confirming the truthfulness of the aroma, an intimate and indescribable mixture of memories and myths.</p>



<p>The drifting vessels of origin collide and take shape, small stories become big ones and vice versa; the seeds keep tangling in your hair, sprouting anecdotes in imaginary landscapes.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-300x200.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1182x788.jpg 1182w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1520x1013.jpg 1520w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-1688x1125.jpg 1688w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-2025x1350.jpg 2025w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-2700x1800.jpg 2700w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-2954x1969.jpg 2954w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-Anna-Ceipe-exhibition-view-2022-photo-Roman-Sten-Tonissoo-scaled.jpg 2560w" data-sizes="auto" width="2560" height="1707" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Anna Ceipe, exhibition view at Hoib gallery, 2022. Photo Roman-Sten Tõnissoo</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>


Sandra Kosorotova. Can I Grow Here. 2022. Still from the video(1)

More often than not, …


<p><strong>Keiu Krikmann</strong> is the editor of A Shade Colder.</p>


Keiu Krikmann


<p>”Nature” was invented to separate wholes from their parts, things from each other, and us from the rest of the world.<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="1" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391-1">1</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391-1" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="1">Gardner, C. 2018. <em>(proem: against nature)</em> in <em>Naturally It Is Not</em>. Sutton: The 87 Press, p 1</span> And the thing that dissects these parts further and cuts nature into landscapes is the human eye. Observable expanses of nature become something to be enjoyed, explored, documented and categorised. But they cannot always be neatly quantified – there are several parallel timelines and imaginaries present in any landscape at any given time. These timelines run at unequal speeds – geological time, for example, moves at a different pace than that of organic life. Therefore, the appearance and disappearance of different types of material in the landscape also follow different logics, even if accelerated or hindered by human intervention.</p>



<p>Regardless of pace, landscapes are always sites of transformation and mutation, where a variety of imaginaries exists simultaneously – places where ecological, political and social concerns entwine with mythological, folkloric and magical thinking.</p>



<p>What follows here is a tentative look at landscapes and their echoes in material-focused artworks. But rather than rendering landscapes in pictures, in the tradition of landscape painting or drawing, or trying to capture landscapes in their totality, in material-based practices, only parts of the landscapes are materialised. Nevertheless, the landscapes and worlds these objects suggest, from which they sprout are equally rewarding to imagine, allowing us to question our own understanding of the relationship between the whole and its parts.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Regeneration of what?</strong></h2>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22.png" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22-199x300.png 199w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22-680x1024.png 680w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22-523x788.png 523w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22-673x1013.png 673w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22-747x1125.png 747w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22-897x1350.png 897w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-16.22.22.png 1088w" data-sizes="auto" width="1088" height="1638" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Laura Põld. Wasteland (The Phosphorite War). 2021. Exhibition view. Photo: Marek Mäemets</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>As the human eye glances at stone, it is designated a resource and the process of its industrialisation begins. And so, Laura Põld’s series of lumpy grey clay sculptures fitted with water, smoke and light, too, evoke an industrial landscape. Titled <em>Wasteland (The Phosphorite War)</em>, it is not an image of factories and production but rather an exhausted and abandoned terrain. The title of the work references a very specific moment in time – an extensive environmental campaign in the 1980s against opening large scale phosphorite mines in the eastern part of Estonia, which at the time was part of the Soviet Union. In addition to standing successfully against Soviet industrialisation, the campaign notably strengthened the national movement, which later led to restoring of the country’s independence. The work also resonates with the current energy crisis and the related questions of energy autonomy and security. Even though the landscape once withstood the threat of colonial extractive industrialisation, is the mining of resources that led to increased environmental damage justified now, when it is no longer done by colonial powers? It is, of course, always a question of ownership of resources and the scale of extraction – will it lead to devastation or leave room for regeneration?</p>



<p>Although Põld’s work materialises industrialised wastelands, landscapes that are transformed by humans, she does not only address the possible environmental cost of industrial extraction but also considers the possible agency of the mineral matter. Through her amorphous objects and somewhat more dynamic elements of smoke and water, she consciously looks at the weirdness of minerals, resisting the singular view of resourcification. Her perspective on the natural world is not scientific and concerned with presenting a factual image but rather different sensibilities present and the possibilities of what else, besides resources, can be (re)generated in the landscape and what else comes alive there, what kind of fruit can it bear.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Return is not advisable</strong></h2>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_R_7004_7005_Vormid_Oun_1975-elo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC1761.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_R_7004_7005_Vormid_Oun_1975-elo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC1761-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_R_7004_7005_Vormid_Oun_1975-elo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC1761-300x199.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_R_7004_7005_Vormid_Oun_1975-elo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC1761-1024x680.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_R_7004_7005_Vormid_Oun_1975-elo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC1761-1186x788.jpg 1186w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_R_7004_7005_Vormid_Oun_1975-elo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC1761-1525x1013.jpg 1525w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_R_7004_7005_Vormid_Oun_1975-elo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC1761-1694x1125.jpg 1694w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_R_7004_7005_Vormid_Oun_1975-elo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC1761.jpg 1778w" data-sizes="auto" width="1778" height="1181" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Elo Järv. Forms Apple I, II. 1975. Photo: Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>In these landscapes, even the most familiar of fruits can bewilder us – at first glance seemingly rotting, the apples are actually leather. In an uncanny mutation, plant and animal have merged, making it a troubling effort to imagine an ecosystem capable of producing such apples.</p>



<p>The pair of leather apples is created by the artist Elo Järv (1939–2018). She is primarily known for her leather sculptures and even though her work is most often categorised as applied art, her practice stands out among her peers in terms of the unconventional use of materials. Järv’s work presents an abundance of nature motifs but often hints at mythology and the unseen forces shaping our understanding of the natural world. The materiality of leather in her sculptures brings a visceral and sometimes eerie dimension to objects, making them perhaps a little difficult to place and suggesting strange and wondrous (natural) worlds, as we see in <em>My Insectivorous Totem</em> (1995) and <em>Insect</em> (1996), for example. It is difficult to say, whether the mutated forms hail from a place of disquiet or calm, but at times caution should be exercised, as suggested by the pair of spindly formations <em>Return Is Not Advisable I, II</em> (1994).</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-scaled.jpeg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-253x300.jpeg 253w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-863x1024.jpeg 863w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-664x788.jpeg 664w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-854x1013.jpeg 854w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-948x1125.jpeg 948w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-1138x1350.jpeg 1138w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-1518x1800.jpeg 1518w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-1660x1969.jpeg 1660w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Jarv-Return-scaled.jpeg 2158w" data-sizes="auto" width="2158" height="2560" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Elo Järv. Return Is Not Advisable I, II. 1994. Image: reproduction from Classics. Elo Järv.</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>It is not only non-humans that exist in these spaces, anthropomorphic forms with their leathery bodies and faces often appear among Järv’s creatures as well. It is not exactly clear if these humanoids are autonomous beings, their shells, shrouds or other representations of memory. Regardless, looking at Järv’s sculptures, I recall <em>The Bog Man</em> – a short story by Margaret Atwood, in which the protagonist Julie has an affair with an archaeologist excavating a bog body and recalling the man years later, she finds herself conflating her former lover and the dead man in her mind: ”Connor, however, loses in substance every time she forms him in words. He becomes flatter and more leathery, more life goes out of him, he becomes more dead. By this time, he is almost an anecdote, and Julie is almost old.”</p>



<p>Indeed, the passing of time is an important aspect to consider when looking at Järv’s sculptures. As time passes and human is no longer a measure of everything, it becomes more of a body than a person. This is emphasised by the instability of organic matter that sits at the forefront of her works. Unlike bronze or stone sculptures, the fragility of the material is almost palpable. This is something Järv is also very much aware of. The work <em>Old Leather Returns</em> (1999) contains an obvious reference to the material and the possibility of re-use and recontextualisation, but is also perhaps suggesting something more sinister – a return from or to a place where return is not advisable.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272-199x300.jpg 199w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272-680x1024.jpg 680w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272-523x788.jpg 523w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272-672x1013.jpg 672w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272-747x1125.jpg 747w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272-896x1350.jpg 896w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ETDM_Na_1968_Oo.-Nagu_1994-Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272.jpg 1181w" data-sizes="auto" width="1181" height="1779" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Elo Järv. Night. Face. 1994. Photo: Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>It sprawls</strong></h2>



<p>The increasing industrial devastation of landscapes also sets limits to what we imagine possible in and for the landscape, making people aware of the very real danger of soon having nothing to return to.</p>



<p>The performance and textile-based work of the collective Sorcerer evokes the industrial landscapes populated and polluted by massive textile waste. Their imagination relies heavily on poetics but is also not detached from the real landscapes from which dispossessed creatures, neither human or animal, arise. Using recycled materials, they look at industrialisation and its spawns, while also presenting a more magical view of the world.</p>



<p>In their latest installation <em>Lustwort</em>, created as part of Heinrich Sepp’s work <em>Made of What</em> (2022), they contemplate the queer materiality of the bog, a type of landscape that does not easily submit to rule and industrialisation, despite having historically been subject to it. Writing on swamp modernity, Egle Rindzevičiūtė says: ”The swamp is antithetical to the linear, mechanistic mind. It defies communication enabled by clear waterways, resists agriculture, and questions human mastery of both territory and living matter. In cultural terms, the swamp stands for tradition, something that is the enemy of progress in the framework of modernization theory.”<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="2" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391-2">2</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391-2" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="2">Rindzevičiūtė, E. 2019. <em>The Swamp Modernity</em> in <em>Swamps and the New Imagination: On the Future of Immaterial Materiality in Art, Architecture and Philosophy</em>, edited by Nomeda Urbonas and Gediminas Urbonas, MIT Press, p 7. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/40047910/The_Swamp_Modernity</span> Standing against the drive to make the bog into something productive, the installation also discards the romantic ideal of becoming one with nature, emphasising the ungovernability of the bog. In opposition to the often-drawn parallel between the feminine and nature, Elvia Wilk has written about women becoming landscape not as a natural process but as an act of non-compliance: ”This is the type of resistance that women and other supposedly unstable bodies have been cultivating for centuries because they’ve had to”.<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="3" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391-3">3</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_1391-3" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="3">Wilk, E. 2022. 2022. <em>Death by Landscape.</em> New York: Soft Skull Press,&nbsp; pp 9–10</span></p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-300x200.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-1182x788.jpg 1182w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-1519x1013.jpg 1519w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-1687x1125.jpg 1687w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-2025x1350.jpg 2025w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-2699x1800.jpg 2699w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-2953x1969.jpg 2953w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MG_0765_Koolnu_jalad_Krikman_Linnagalerii_2022_photo_Paul_Kuimet-copy_-scaled.jpg 2560w" data-sizes="auto" width="2560" height="1707" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Sorcerer. Lustwort as part of Heinrich Sepp’s installation Made of What. 2022. Exhibition view. Photo: Paul Kuimet. Courtesy of Tallinn Art Hall</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>As the climate, and landscapes with it, increasingly slip out of human control, perhaps a similar process of non-compliance becomes the norm as we blend into the composite landscapes of material of varying origin, both human and not, and become one with our waste. There is always something monstrous in entities that remain ungovernable and unreproductive – uncertain landscapes populated by monsters, or perhaps, these landscapes are the monsters.</p>



<p></p>


ETDM_Na_1968_Öö. Nägu_1994 Aelo_jarv_etdm_ivar_veermae_DSC2272

Parallel formations


<p><strong>Kärt Ojavee</strong> is an artist, designer and a visiting professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts textile department. She experiments with new technologies and traditional textile fabricating techniques, testing the borders of both disciplines.</p>


Kärt Ojavee

‘Healing Detox Shirt ’ Ojavee, K. (2020) _Photo by Mari Volens

Material affairs


<p><strong>Marika Agu</strong> is currently working as curator and archivist at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art. She has cultivated projects from a range of topics, such as archives, material culture and writing within contemporary art context.</p>


Marika Agu


<p>On the first episode of <em>Majickk Sound</em>, the host Marika Agu interviews sound artist John Grzinich to discuss his current practice, developments in the field of sound art and tackle his personal ambivalence towards the variety of sounds. The podcast features a snippet from <em>Geofractions</em> (2021), a composition consisting of field recordings of the extractive and residual mining processes in Ida-Virumaa, as well as a track titled <em>Recurrent Territories</em> (2005), recorded and produced while travelling in Estonia, Germany, Italy and USA.<br>John Grzinich’s extensive sound practice involves field recording, kinetic sculptures, electro-acoustic composition, filmmaking, performance, group workshops and exercises in listening. Currently he is teaching as associate professor in the new media department at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Check his<a href="https://maaheli.bandcamp.com/"> Bandcamp</a> and<a href="https://maaheli.ee/main/"> website</a> for further info.</p>



<p></p>



<p><iframe loading="lazy" width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1382187982&amp;color=%23dc99d4&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true"></iframe></p>


majickk thumbnail

Majickk sound. A conversation with John Grzinich

Franz-Joseph-Ruprecht-ja-Alexander-Postels-levää-keräämässä.-Kuvitusta-Postelsin-ja-Ruprechtin-teokseen-Illustrationes-algarum-Kuvia-levistä.-Pietari-1840

Guide to late autumn and winter exhibitions in Estonia and beyond 2022/2023

A Shade Colder is a platform for discussions about and around art in Estonia and beyond.

Whispers in the Landscape

Editorial. Whispers in the Landscape

By Kaarin Kivirähk

Whispers in the Landscape

the girliness of the wasteland

By Vaim Sarv

Demonic spaces and offshore formations – Alexandra Waliszewska and Balto-Slavic landscapes

By Natalia Sielewicz & Alison M. Gingeras

Ingrown infrastructures

By Eglė Rindzevičiūtė

More often than not, …

By Vaida Stepanovaite

Parallel formations

By Keiu Krikmann

Material affairs

By Kärt Ojavee

Majickk sound. A conversation with John Grzinich

By Marika Agu

Guide to late autumn and winter exhibitions in Estonia and beyond 2022/2023