{"id":11952,"date":"2019-07-10T17:42:13","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T17:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?page_id=11952"},"modified":"2019-07-19T17:03:29","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T17:03:29","slug":"tracing-the-land-kilpisjarvi","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?page_id=11952","title":{"rendered":"Tracing the Land"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Alice Smits<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n<!--noteaser-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Alice Smits<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Last September I was\none of the participants of Field_Notes: Ecology of Senses, an\nart and science field laboratory organized by the Bioart Society at the Kilpisj\u00e4rvi\nBiological Station in sub-Arctic Lapland in the north of Finland. As a curator\nand researcher of site-specific practices around art and ecology, I was\nparticularly interested in learning and experimenting with new methodologies of\nfieldwork that would arise from the exchange between artists and scientists.\nBeing foremost an observer, I joined the \u201cSecond Order\u201d group convened by\nHannah Rogers (also the editor of this series for <em>Art Journal Open<\/em>). The group\u2019s members infiltrated the other groups\nas researchers reflecting on approaches to embodied learning and environmental\nsensing. I went equipped with a small video camera, with the goal of expressing\nmyself in a language I am less familiar with, that of video documentation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Below I include some of the sounds\nand images of my experiment in documenting both our field research activities\nand the voice of the land to which we responded. My short video, which I titled\n<em>Tracing the Land<\/em>, features some of the people who\nparticipated in the Field_Notes residency. We watch them in various activities\nthrough which they try to tune into their environment: through voice\nexperiments, using technological extensions to pick up electromagnetic waves or\ntaking bird\u2019s-view images by flying drones, through listening and recording, reading\ntexts, and discussing. We also encounter the land and some of the creatures\nthat inhabit it in various ways of framing, offering the viewer a different\nlevel into the materiality and voicing of the environment itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:20px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-vimeo aligncenter wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-vimeo wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/316914393?dnt=1&#038;app_id=122963\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" title=\"Tracing the Land\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:20px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Following are some reflections that\nI wrote during my experiences of \u201ctracing the land\u201d of Kilpisj\u00e4rvi with my\nfellow travelers, be they people or other living and nonliving entities. I intend\nfor these words and images to instill within you some of the feelings, sounds,\nvisions, smells, and tastes of our exploration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The chief value of Field_Notes, for me, was found in the generosity and openness of the program, allowing for free experimentation and exchange with a group of people in a fascinating environment (though all the while realizing the lack of enough connection to the culture and history of the community that inhabits it). Though we were all from different cultures and backgrounds in arts and sciences, we had one thing in common: we wanted to understand better how to learn and connect with all our senses to the world around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nature writing has often been about humans reflecting on what they see from six feet above the ground, bringing along representations and symbols to make sense of a place. But what is the sensing in sense-making? In Kilpisj\u00e4rvi, we roamed around for eight days in the tundra, bending our gaze low at micro scale with attentiveness to the realm of \u201ccryptozoa\u201d\u2014critters unseen and hidden\u2014and to the macro scale of the clouds and skies above us and everything animate and inanimate, visible and invisible, in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Stories of reindeer\nwere with us all the time\u2014part of the land and part of the lives of the locals\nwe talked to\u2014with their shifting of minds as they adapt to the seasons, guiding\nus as we set foot in strange lands. On the first day, we tried to be a herd, to\nsubmit our individuality to the consciousness of a group. While we walked\nsilently as the stones cracked beneath our feet, always being sensitive to each\nother and our environment, always looking out, sensing the other, we became\nmore aware that the space around us was not empty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So landscape, as a space that is laid out in front of us for only our gaze to dwell in, became land, where our bodies met with the wet mud and hard rocks. As we were made to understand by a local, stories are only told by those who stay inside; those who are with the land have no time for stories. On the second day, we crawled like slime mold in the dirt, eyes cast downward to the earth, fingers grasping, backs touching, imagining ourselves as a collective intelligence, twisting and turning together, breaking up and coming back together. We tried to be fluid. Later in the week, somebody proposed the term \u201cenlichenment.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We invented new languages, bending words to allow us to feel and think differently: to disorient, rewire ourselves, to leave our fixed patterns and follow new paths to explore what we are capable of. \u201cOne being\u2019s signal is another being\u2019s noise,\u201d somebody quoted Jakob von Uexk\u00fcll, who proposed the term <em>Umwelt<\/em> for describing each person\u2019s subjective sensory world. We tried to hear and feel all the noises as well as we could, and added our own, not sure who was listening. They might have been there \u2026 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We used all sorts of gadgets to sense the world better. Reindeer are the only mammals that can see ultraviolet light, to allow them to see things in the glowing white of snow; we use black lights to see what they see. We wired ourselves, grew antennas to pick up electromagnetic waves, flew drones to see from up high, explored our technological bodies to sense beyond what our bodies are capable of. We took samples\u2014lots of samples, while we straddled the land\u2014and put them under microscopes to see things that otherwise remain invisible. We dug into the earth, tried to imagine the passing of time for the rocks, and listened long and attentively to the rumbling of water underneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We were thirty-eight\nartists, designers, biologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, curators,\nwriters, and researchers from many places in the world, coming together in the\nsub-Arctic region of Finland. Most of us flew out there to experiment with\nsituated and embodied practices together, understanding what these can really\nmean when exploring the land, and questioned why fieldwork always was about\nworking upon rather than being with the field. Equally we were redefining artwork\nas art that works in the world. Circling back and forth\nbetween experiences, narrations, impressions, memories, facts, and smells, we tried\nto open ourselves through all our senses and to voices other than our own. Yet\nwe also worked and took samples\nwherever we went.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This\ntime I did not go equipped with a pen and paper but a video camera to observe\nthe processes and methods we experimented with, to approach the land as we spent\nour days roaming the tundra. I registered (tried to, at least) not only the\nimages and sounds of my fellow explorers, but also those of the rocks, the\nlichen, the reindeer, the clouds passing, the horizon, and the earth under our\nfeet. With my camera\u2019s zoom, I focused closely on the edge of stones, shot\nright through the surface of the water to capture its touch upon the rocks,\nmoved quickly to catch the roaring wind on the nearby Norwegian cliffs to then\nagain fix a wide frame, moving from landscape to land and back again. The\nediting process allowed for a deeper experience of this circling back and forth\nbetween various layers of knowing and sensing, as I juxtaposed widely divergent\nimages and timeframes. Using various camera techniques\u2014wide shots, extreme\nclose-ups, near abstraction through grainy, out-of-focus shots and erratic\nmovement, and insertion of silent dream images\u2014on top of literary quotations\nand spoken word, I tried to capture different approaches to and sensations of\nthe land. This process resulted in a short observational video that captures\nsome of the artistic practices of fieldwork and a cinematic experience of the\nvoice of the land itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Modern science equaled rationality with its distanced gaze. We did not move into the irrational, but instead sought another basis for knowledge that is situated, of a place, recognizing our sensing bodies as organs that make sense. Thinking as practice is always part of the environment, focusing on the event, the specific rather than the general, allowing ourselves to listen, feel, smell, hear, and taste before passing judgment. It is this intimate attachment that brings a sense of care into the encounter and what Donna Haraway so beautifully calls response-ability: the ability to respond to that which is intrinsically alien yet related to us. We slowly realized that we are not moving through empty space but through one that is filled with life, and we imagined our entanglement with everything around us and the fluidity of our bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are also other\nthings, the common, little things that mingle and cross as we stretch out,\ntrying not to grasp. We also fail, all the time, but we keep searching,\nexploring, we fall and lay still to then move on, always moving, changing,\ntransforming, learning how to move without direction and closure. We learned a\nlot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These are the risks\ninvolved in trying to make sense of the world and the changing sense of self\nthat appears in an effort to acknowledge entanglement, complexity, and\ncomplicity. The landscape in the Arctic is not silent. It is a slow landscape that\nretains traces of its past like scars on its surface. We now might be part of\nit too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Alice Smits<\/strong> is the artistic director of <a href=\"http:\/\/zone2source.net\/\">Zone2Source<\/a>, an exhibition platform for art, nature and technology in the Amstelpark, Amsterdam, and a researcher of contemporary land art practices and Anthropocene theory at <a href=\"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/?p=4619\ufeff\">Lectorate&nbsp;of&nbsp;Art&nbsp;and&nbsp;Public&nbsp;Space\/Rietveld&nbsp;Academy&nbsp;Amsterdam<\/a>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alice Smits<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":11298,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-11952","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}