MAKING OF | November 2020

An enquiry into the symbiosis between the boreal forest and clouds.

Discovering Atmospheric Un/knowing, Josefina Nelimarkka’s immersive site-sensitive project in Finland.

Shall we first talk about Air?

I am looking up into the sky – into the realm of air and the atmospheric phenomena – in the context of climate change and our relationship with the environment. Clouds in climate, society and culture. All this relates to my interest in the invisible – and how to make it visible through various artistic processes and site-sensitive installations. 

Lately I have been focusing my research on the politics of air, the metaphysical properties of aerial matter, atmospheric memory and the nanoscale hyperflux in the atmosphere. Mixing sensory ephemerality and scientific data, I wish to present a new kind of environmental consciousness linked to my notion of the cloud.

Broadly speaking, my work touches on the notion of flow and energy. When the work changes with the environment or when the process is connected to data measured from the air, the momentary nature of the atmospheric circulation from local weather and wind patterns to the energy distribution on Earth’s surface become part of the experience.

For the past few years, I have been studying closely the matter of air and the formation of atmospheric aerosol particles which have a profound role in our climate system - from air quality to global temperatures - in collaboration with climate scientists, paleoclimatologists and nanotechnologists. Through these ongoing conversations and my residency at the INAR (Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research) climate research station in Finland I gained access to the most recent climate information which I regard as my responsibility when working with these critical questions related to climate change.

For me, it is important to continue searching for different ways to connect my work with the change in the environment. My focus is often in the natural processes all around us which often remain partly hidden in our daily experience, despite their influence upon us. Moving across different scales – between micro and macro – and translating these explorations into sensorial experiences I aim to connect the viewer with the current state of the climate. The interconnectedness of natural and anthropogenic processes becomes part of the art work manifesting the fragile presence of nature.

Both the art work and the viewer are present in the ongoing change. I refer to it as climate interaction: it is about creating an interactive process from which the art work emerges but also continuously interacts with the environment and evolves within. This is the experientiality that I wish to bring forth through my work through an ecocritical lens – potentially it examines, questions and renews ourselves and our relationship with the environment.

Finland is Europe’s “forest giant” with forest areas covering almost 75% of the land. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your forest?

I grew up with this forest so it is a very emotional place for me. It is near my family’s cottage in Raseborg, 100 km. from Helsinki.  

The forest is a mix of coniferous trees such as pine, spruce and other evergreen species but also including birch and aspen – all this with a carpet of soft moss where you just want to rest on. You can also find steep rock formations from the last ice age, a flowing river and a secret pond of waterlilies (like in Monet’s garden at Giverny but totally overgrown and under the northern sky). 

The boreal forests are magical places for air: the overwhelming scent of the forest is actually organic vapours forming aerosol particles, very rapidly and seemingly out of nowhere. So in this way, in addition to their ability to store large quantities of carbon and clean the air, forests change the composition of the atmosphere. (And the air is not only full of aerosols but also healthy microbes.) As the temperatures rise, the forests are thought to emit more of these chemical compounds ultimately meaning more aerosols and more cloud droplets leading to more clouds – and reflecting more sunlight away from Earth’s surface. At present, it is thought that clouds have a cooling effect on our planet (yet it is unclear how much of it vanishes in the warming by the greenhouse gases).

So basically this boreal forest has a special relationship to the clouds above it as it alters the hydrological cycle through cloud formation. I find this symbiosis very poetic so I think this gave me the idea to realise the path for Atmospheric Un/knowing the way I did in this particular forest. 

The work is rooted in my ongoing research about atmospheric conditions and future scenarios of climate change but this time I chose to focus on the air this forest breathes and my own symbiotic relationship with it.

How did the idea come about? 

As the world started to ‘shut down’ in response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, I arrived at our family cottage near the forest. I was of course thinking of ways to continue my work during this period of self- isolation but I also felt the need to respond to the new situation with physicality so I started going for long walks in the nearby forest every day.  

I immediately felt that the trees were holding more answers to the threats the pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis were posing. Walking in nature became my way of coping with a future that seemed unforeseeable, of building resilience to uncertainty. It also allowed me to take an unprecedented pause, which was an opportunity to slow down and re-evaluate my practice. A slow pace is such a rare treat nowadays, even if it often gets vilified in our impatient culture that does not value waiting. But waiting allows for self-reflection which I believe may be one of the important questions we have arrived at in this global situation. For me, this time in the forest, this “active pause” opened up the possibility to take my work back to its origins, to the atmospheric conditions in the boreal forest.

Atmospheric Un/knowing emerged from the instabilities of air and the interactive possibilities of clouds – both real and imagined. The work journeys along a forest path with poetic language written to encourage the walking to become a performative reading of the environment. The starting point is un/knowing – in multiple ways.

When I was walking in the forest and writing the poetics, I needed  to ‘unknow’ the air and the cloud. Unknowing is about the loss of language, the disappearance of knowledge and the appearance of imagined futures – essentially this became the cloud for me.

Of course the actual clouds are also very complex. Although they are “only” made of water droplets and ice crystals, their microphysics and interactions remain to a large extent unknown. Even though they seem so familiar to us we do not know so much about them.

I was also thinking about the sensitivity of the sky, how miniscule and molecular changes in the atmosphere can have such wide-reaching consequences in the Earth’s climate system and of course humanity.

So the enigma of the sky and the clouds, disrupting language and semiotics, invisible interactions and their potentiality became tools to support this unknowing; but all of this was anchored in the physicality of my walking and being in the forest. The unknown needs to be experienced, otherwise it cannot exist.

With Atmospheric Un/knowing I wanted to create a meditative experience which would bring forth the symbiosis between boreal forests and clouds but reframe the notion of the cloud in a very personal and intimate way, one that was rooted in the moment and in the body.

How does walking become writing and writing become reading? How does all of that relate to being, to the external and internal landscape?

Tell us about the production and installation process; how did you choose the materials?

There was a lot to consider when it came to bringing this work to life. Obviously how to translate the conceptual aspects to a visual and sensory experience but also the forest itself.

It was important to think about this in terms of materiality and installation: what can be added to the natural environment? The forest does not really need anything. It is also the ‘protagonist’ of the work so the goal was never to distract from it but rather to reveal more of it if that makes sense. In terms of materials I decided to use transparent and mirror plexi as I thought it would be the most subtle and least invasive way to install work in the delicate forest – it is also quite weather proof!

The idea was to install text, laser cut into panels, into chosen locations in the forest in a layout reminiscent of currents of air and breezes of wind. The transparent panels and mirror surfaces are installed between trees at different heights along the path. Depending on the point of view, they either reflect the surroundings or completely disappear in the boreal green. What remains from the erasure of the letters is our experience; the negation of language in the forest calls for unknowing the words.

The work is hidden in the forest (you need a map to find it) and it becomes visible when the light reveals it against the trees. If you are lucky, you will witness a chromatic dispersion coming out of the text. Reflections on the mirror surfaces show a double-view into the distance of the forest, as if you also had eyes in the back of your head. Also, transparency is interesting to work with materially because it is so interactive with the landscape. ‘Invisible’ materials host maximum variations.

I also had to think carefully about selecting the locations and connecting the paths between them; I chose the locations that were more meaningful to me during my walks but I also had to make sure that installing work or marking a path wouldn’t harm the vegetation on the ground.  

The scale of the forest was also important to consider. Some works are installed very high against the sky [I used very tall ladders!] whereas some remain at eye level. If you look carefully, you will find arrows with the wordplay ‘(w)here’ pointing to the sites.

It was quite a long process, from conception to planning, production and installation, but a very rewarding one. The ‘unknowing’ and an element of wonder continued well into the installation and documentation stages and I am certain that every visit along the path will always reveal more.

How does the written word feature in your work?

I consider reading to be as important as writing and to my mind both are performative acts.

I am drawn to the idea of deconstructing language and text. When words become fragments, they become more relational and it is possible to encounter them anew by connecting them more freely to the moment they exist within. Experientiality is my starting point for writing, it is about creating textual clouds.

In Atmospheric Un/knowing, the language is literally cut away. For me, unknowing is essentially knowledge that arrives in negation. How to create new meaning through removing, disrupting and distancing the language we know?

Performativity in this work is allowing writing, walking and reading to perform in yourself and in relation to the environment. The moment decides for you how you read. The moment reveals the unknown within the known but it is not about being obscure or searching for the secret of the work; it is about accepting its essence, the unknown as simply unknown.

Unknowing is always a bit dangerous because you need to let go, forget, almost lose yourself.  But the visuality of the words in this work is a form of protection, it supports and guides this experience. 

There is a performative element in Atmospheric Un/knowing both in terms of its inception and in terms of the experience of the viewer. Can you elaborate on that?

Air is a kind of multiplicity, something that cannot be accurately defined or fixed into stable being because it is constantly in motion. As an entity with no boundaries, air continuously shifts, reacts and returns. Air is an instant, a fleeting moment which is already gone when we start to understand what it is: air is now.

What language does the wind talk? Shifting between what is lost and what is gained, walking, writing and reading becomes a quest for the invisible. Air is not only atmospheric but also temporal, like language. So the work happens in the now.

This constant movement, the shifting between one instance of the now and the next is the inherent performativity of Atmospheric Un/knowing. But the physicality of experiencing the work through the body is equally important. 

After I chose the sites for the installation along the path, I organised them into pauses, encounters and silences to guide the viewer’s experience. A pause is an inward direction; stop, breathe, read, interpret. An encounter is a curious outward movement; seek, approach, discover. Silence refers to the silence of language because the forest itself is never silent.

Walking/writing/reading along the path is a new orientation towards language, leaving behind its origins and shifting towards new meanings. That is why I refer to it as a path of thoughts. Move your body and reinvent the language between the letters. It is not just the phrasing and spacing that guide the viewer but also the way the letters are cut out. This is how the logic of negation opens up the space between one possibility and another, and becomes the air between the letters and the landscape. Caesura is an important concept in this work; in poetry it signifies a pause between phrases and, interestingly, its etymology derives from the latin word for “cutting”.

How to encounter the words physically? By viewing the environment through the missing letters or letting the gaze follow the twisty and spiralling currents the words form. Some writings are double-sided (‘What kind of cloud is the poem/What kind of poem is the cloud?’) requiring the viewer to walk around the work. The text is very gestural and the viewing experience becomes a kind of choreography.

The choreography and the environment influence the reading so that essentially what you read is your own cloud. The work is what arrives from the words inhabiting the mind, the body and the environment in the potential of the now.

Your work has always incorporated input from your research interests and external, often invisible elements yet in this particular project it feels that the most important input was you; your movements, your rhythm, your gaze and emotional landscape.  Would you say your creative process was different this time, did it feel more personal?

It was very personal because the work is located in the forest where I have spent so much time since my childhood. I feel a really strong sense of belonging there. This affected both the process of writing and the installation itself. When I was planning the route, I was thinking a lot about the body and how it moves in the forest. In my writing, the movement of my body and the way my gaze travelled informed the rhythm of the words.

I have been looking into the politics of air from many perspectives. My collaborations with climate scientists have supported this enquiry and provided me access to the world of atmospheric data. There is so much potential in working with climate data and transforming it into sensorial experiences beyond numbers; fundamentally it is about expanding the communication between us and the environment. I like to think of it as a movement from the real to the speculative as the interactive processes depend on the actual events in the environment yet the outcome is always unknown because of real-time measurement.

But Atmospheric Un/knowing emerged from a different reasoning: the movement is from the speculative to the intimate. The work is initiated from imagining the constant change of air, the power that forms the clouds. But the cloud I refer to here is not only the actual cloud made of water and air but also a mix of poetic elements that constitutes your own individual cloud. The walking and the personal observation finalises what kind of ‘path of thought’ the work will be.

So the work originated in my research interests, was filtered through the intimate lens of my own internal exploration and my own experience of the forest throughout a series of moments (of nows) but its actualisation releases it back to its atmospheric origins. The process of Un/knowing and the performative nature of the work mean that ultimately the cloud is not formed in the eyes of the creator/ writer but in the mind of the viewer/ reader.

The question then becomes ‘How does it feel to walk through your cloud?’.

You work across a wide variety of media, how do you capture the atmospheric condition in painting and sculpture?

For me, the atmospheric condition is about contemplating on the fleeting moment of air and the phenomenology of clouds. I attempt to capture the suspension of time that originates in the atmosphere but then transforms through the process of colour or glass blowing. The process is the basis for the work in a sense. Therefore, I spend a lot of time investigating and experimenting with the material.

The material process needs to enhance the conceptual enquiries. What excites me is the potential of the process, the unknown I am moving towards – allowing the material to do its thing. The sense of wonder is very important to me and everything is very intuitive.

When I am painting, the surface of the work is a space of exploration for the atmospheric condition through a painterly process I call supersaturation. Raw pigments and glass powder are added layer by layer until the work becomes supersaturated by colour. The process is slow and the fluid instantiated by the chemistry of colour (the magic!). The surfaces become very sculptural due to the thickness of the material which also continues around the edge of the stretcher.

The paintings interpret the events in the air and aerial spaces, however, in supersaturation they become abstracted and forget their natural origins. Returning back to the expanded notion of the cloud that I mentioned before, the paintings are imagined scenarios that do not represent but rather they perform the cloud. The luminosity, the blur, the translucency, the distance, the float, the temperature and the seeming softness…The viewing experience relies on the immediacy of the materiality. Once supersaturated, the painted surfaces become interactive as the reflective pigments change their shiny appearance depending on the angle of light and the viewpoint. So, in a sense, the work always renews itself.  

Moving between fluid and solid, glass is very dynamic in nature. Through a complicated glass blowing process, I have attempted to capture the poetic event of a cloud droplet transforming through supersaturation of air. Air Holders is a series of glass works that hold the air in their form. The work is made by breathing air into the hot glass and preserving the atmospheric condition inside forever.

The age of air fascinates me. Through my collaboration with the paleoclimatologists from the Department of Geography at UCL, I found out that the oldest air in the world is trapped beneath the ice in Antarctica. These million-year-old bubbles reveal the secrets of climate history; it is like a historical breath which travels through deep time to the now and into the future. I consider the air bubbles trapped inside my glass sculptures potential because they hold the information of the present moment which projects the climate-yet-to-be. Air Holders ask what is inside and what is around us now and in the future.

Supersaturation provides a way to look at different phases of matter, oversaturated states and cloud formation. Like the atmospheric condition (or the cloud), it is a physical event but it elicits an emotional response too. The process is always an ontological question about being and becoming.

What is next with Atmospheric Un/knowing?

Atmospheric Un/knowing is a permanent installation but I am also planning a digital experience realised virtually as I am working with 360 video material. With this immersive technology, I was able to capture everything that was there, simultaneously, from every direction, in spherical video. The beauty of 360 is that it can transport people to places. It feels there are endless possibilities when it comes to what to do with the footage for example in AR/VR. I am also looking to enhance the actual experience of visitors by creating a proper physical map.

But we will see.. The Un/known is not only the subject of the work; it was also present in the process of creating it and of experiencing it. As the work remains in the forest, outside, it is exposed to the changing light, weather conditions and the seasons; so walking the path will always be a new experience from which new possibilities arise. What I said before about the work being formed in the mind of the viewer oddly applies to me as well. Returning to it again and again will always feel like coming home but the cloud will be ever changing.  

JOSEFINA NELIMARKKA

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