The site-responsive video installation Some Places I Walked (Kilpisjärvi 2023) was presented at the Taidelaitos Haihatus autumn exhibition on 21 October 2023, three weeks into my residency at Haihatus, in central Finland. The installation brought trees and tundra from Kilpisjärvi, Lapland into conversation with Kesäino (the Summer Theatre), a wooden building in the Haihatus complex, built around 1870.
The video work drew on research undertaken at the SOLU Bioarts research laboratory Field_Notes: the North Escaping, which I attended in September 2023. Field_Notes brought 23 artists together at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Research Centre for a two-week intensive research lab navigating the commonalities, conflicts and possible conversations between art research and the methods, tools, and knowledge structures of scientific research.
I participated in the research pod Andscapes, which focused on the tools and methods by which scientists measure, document, record, and make meaning of the other-than-human world, or in philosophical terms, narrate and refine a worldview. Our group of five artists worked together on collaborative and individual projects; the foundational works for this installation came from a small personal side-project with the working title Quadrant Test. Quadrant Test mimics the research quadrant and methodological procedures of biological science to make a work investigating my implication in and discomfort with the multi-species damage unthinkingly inflicted by artist and scientist alike.
I gathered a ‘research team’ of instruments and devices and assembled an ad hoc recording rig; GoPro and audio mic attached to my right boot, a video camera strapped to my back and a stethoscope/voice recorder device taped to my chest. I carefully trod the quadrant, berries popping underfoot, and small mushrooms crushed. The whole event was recorded by a third, stationary video camera. The research method felt brutal, so there were no further Quadrant Tests.
For the installation Some Places I Walked (Kilpisjärvi 2023) I worked with the material from Quadrant Test to draw out a digital trace of a specific interaction between a human artist-researcher, her digital recording devices and a vegetal community dwelling in the transition zone between birch forest and tundra. This digital recollection was brought into play with Kesäino and its objects, occupying the interior space as a place-skin of light sliding over the rough-hewn wooden walls, chairs, AV trolleys, tables and furniture stacked away for the winter.
Bringing video projection into play with objects in such a context provides the opportunity to bring selected elements to the fore and allow others to drop back. Here the boots tread the quadrant isolated on the side of a wooden trolley, while the artist’s body fluctuates and disappears among objects and shadows on the back wall. On the wall and ceiling the tundra is rhythmically crushed under the researcher’s boot, while below it a tiny moss flower flutters in the breeze, contained within the space of an overturned chair.
JILL SORENSEN 