GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Karlotta Sperling

I went to Estonia having no certain idea what to do but with a big interest and some pre-aquired knowledge in the topic.

In hindsight I am very happy I did it that way! During our stay there was not much time to decide what to follow up, everything was tightly organized and executed. The selection of experts was very interesting and diverse in their form of knowledge. Only the time to process and pour it into some form of artistic output was scarce.

What I found most interesting was the concept of nature that was peaking out through the daily usage of language. The area we were traveling is known to be the industrialized region of Estonia. Heavy mining activities over the last century have transformed the appearance here. Mountains grew out of ash and rubble. Open mining areas collapsed.

Nature plays a central role in the narration of estonian as a cultural and national identity. The heavy industrialization coincides with the highest percentage of Russian-speaking Estonians. In a conversation with a geologist he connected a disrespect for the nature with being alien to it. He also described it as „disrupted nature“. A terraformed area with no natural value but a possible site for other usages for eg wind turbines and polluting touristic activities. Another interviewee referred to the south of Estonia as „pure nature“ and connected to the narrative of an ethnic estonian identity. The moral judgement of the landscape is connected with the perception of it as specifically „natural“ and intact or disrupted and „unnatural“. Nature is also used as a marker for ethnic identity, to veil ethnic discrimination.

What was very fruitful for my artistic output was the encounter with the material, with oil shale. So far I have just seen pictures and my understanding of it in text form has its limits. I was very surprised that it was lying around on the surface and that the sedimented layers were so visible. It reminded me of Millefeuille, of a delicious crumbly dessert. My weak attempts of realizing its origins, the millions of years and the tropical sea floor that it originated from made it even more strange and fascinating of finding it on the ground in the present.

The place where we saw our first oil shale was a post open pit mining area. A landscape with a fresh face that I firstly perceived as unperturbed nature but that was heavily marked by the industry.

I was immediately drawn to trying to change the landscape myself, trying to leave something that might be undetectable for most people to see but that changes the weathering of the landscape and the stone. I turned around every stone in rectangle so the white bellies were showing. The other side of the stones were already black and weathered.

I also took a big piece of oil shale with me to dissect it and see its different layers. This is how Rieke and my joined project started.

It was a form of experiment, a form of play, an encounter. We took oil shale and dissected it into its layers. It was harder than I thought. After that we tried to reconstruct it. To put it back together as it was before, impossible of course.

In a next experiment we burnt the stone. That was fun and mystic somehow. Burning stones sounds like oxymoron. It needed a lot of heating and a chimney construction but then it worked surprisingly well. It was extremely stinky. We collected the ash, mixed it with clay and formed new stones, trying to imitate natural looking rocks.

From all this process we created GIFs, constructing and reconstructing over and over and over again. For the little exhibition we put our two laptops on a stand, back to back, on both lots of GIFs that were constantly playing. You could click on one in the background to bring it upfront. It created a confusing ever collapsing landscape. One computer was more physical deconstruction, the other digital. We added the sound of the physical destruction on one laptop, and a generic 10h birdsong audio piece on the other.

I think it was a very interesting attempt of creating digital landscape and playing with notions of natural and artificial.

I haven’t quite decided what I want to do but here are some ideas I want to think about a bit longer. I will be updating this over the next week but for now I want to use this platform as a way of tracking ideas.

I am interested in the relation of social and ecological transformation.

I want to explore the codependency between an exhausted landscape and humans.

Mining Towns: i visited Viivikonna in 2020, a mining town that was built, partly through forced labour. After the WWII around 1800 people lived there. Nowadays only about 50 people remain. Income is low. People are old. Most houses are dilapidated. Some people also say it’s haunted. The feeling was

Erschöpfte Landschaften

I was thinking about the notion of „erschöpfte Landschaften“ (exhausted landscapes). I understand it in a sense of finite resources but also in a sense of a social drain, of a landscape that Francisco Martinez and Marika Agu call landscapes of ‚no more’. How do you describe these landscapes without romanticizing the decay.

To research further: There is an increase of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic media outlet which seems very zeitgeisty. But why are people so lusty for it? Also dark tourism, ‚lost places‘, etc. Are there archives of oilshale mining?

I will be going to Sillamäe before the excursion for some days. I am particularly interested in the atomic heritage of the city and post-socialist developments. I also find black shale as a material very intriguing. Legend has it that black shale was used to extract uranium during the first extractions in Sillamäe during soviet times. The ne

There is a statue of Prometheus bringing the atom that was erected 2 years after the catastrophe in Chernobyl.

Methods

On the one hand I have an interest that is more driven by the material of oil shale, black shale and ash, on the other hand I like archival material, interviews. I work with sound, video and clay. One piece focuses on unburnt clay and water and the acoustic event that happens when both meet. I am very interested in the self-cementing properties of oil-shale ash and am wondering how complex this process is and if it’s feasible to experiment with that. I could imagine that it’s also an acoustically interesting event but also in the context of an afterlife of the waste. I could imagine that it is also interesting to experiment with the self cementing process and use a hydrophone to record. All in all I would like to weave a thread between social and ecological transformation.

Literature

Eeva Kesküla (2018): Waste People/Value Producers: Ambiguity, Indeterminacy, and Postsocialist Russian-Speaking Miners.

Martínez , Francisco and Marika Agu. 2021. “Postcards from the Edge: Territorial Sacrifice and Care in Eastern Estonia.” Roadsides 5: 68-75. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26034/ roadsides-202100510.

Bauer, Elisabeth and Tappe, Jonathan (2018): Ölschiefer in Estland: Fossile Politik im Vorreiterland. URL: https://www.kas.de/documents/252038/253252/7_dokument_dok_pdf_51934_1.pdf.

Hade, Sigrid and Soesoo, Alvar (2014): GRAPTOLITE ARGILLITES REVISITED: A FUTURE RESOURCE?

Artist references will follow...