Stories Saari Residence 02.01.2025 Can we think with a place without it having imprinted us? Stories Saari Residence 02.01.2025 Can we think with a place without it having imprinted us? Reviving the Wild Reviving the Wild is a series that highlights different aspects of ecological activities at Saari Residence. This article is an interview with a Saari Invited Artist. During every individual residency period at Saari, one artist or artist-researcher focusing on various ecological issues is invited to stay at the residence. The Saari Invited Artist Programme provides resident groups with ways to deepen their ecological thinking and examine their connection to nature. Text Taru Elfving Illustration FRAUD Share: In their practice, the artist pack FRAUD traces the myriad impacts of extractive histories and ongoing circulations of matter and capital. As the September-October 2024 invited artists at Saari Residence, they returned to the shores of the Baltic Sea to think alongside the geological deposits and mining sites deeply entangled with the fate of this body of water and its more-than-human community. It is unseasonably warm but drizzling as we walk up a slope through the woods. When we reach the site marked on the maps as a viewing place, a panorama over a vast limestone quarry opens up. The thick clouds in the sky mirror the steep banks of cut stone. Everything is bathed in grey. What we see from this designated point of view is only a part of the story of this cavity carved into the earth. The quarry extends beyond the opposite banks, and these days the active mining only takes place deep below the surface, in tunnels. The dust no longer spreads to the centre of the city or out to sea, which both lie right next to the site where we are standing. Driving back to the mainland from the archipelago, we cross a bridge that was recently found to be structurally unstable. A new larger bridge is under construction, but we have to crawl over the old one alongside numerous trucks transporting products from the quarry, mainly to feed the unsatiable hunger for more cement. A tiny stream of a side product from the quarry – lime spread on fields to bind phosphate from fertilizers to reduce nutrient run-off to waterways – is presented as a solution to the eutrophication of the Archipelago Sea. This specific agricultural product has brought us here on an excursion as part of the residency by FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo) at the Saari Residence. Yet, the quarry opens up vistas beyond its immediate surroundings to the global extraction and circulation of both raw materials and capital. What used to be a local business excavating the geological lime deposit, which is rare on these shores, is now home to an international operation recently bought by a multinational corporation backed by major investment companies. Placemat for ‘Radical Connections’ exhibition (Oct-Dec 2024), curated by Henrik Majlund Toft. Lagenid porous foraminiferus. Calcareous skeleton of glassy and slighly-perforated appearance. Source: National Mining Company of the Sahara (ENMINSA) Discovery, Measurement and Evaluation of the Bu-Craa Phosphate Deposit. Madrid: ENMINSA, 1966. Image courtesy of Lino Camprubi. Phantoms of Phosphate For some years now, in their ongoing project EURO—VISION, FRAUD has been following the trails of the so-called Critical Raw Materials. It is, in short, an enquiry into “the extractive gaze of European institutions and policies,” focused on securing continued access to materials deemed critical to the EU. Through the lens of these materials, FRAUD draws into view the relationships between the management of resources, international relations, trade and regulations, and the myriad impacts on ecologies and communities interconnected by material flows. By retracing the routes and histories of the materials, FRAUD could be said to materially ground geopolitics. In its many manifestations so far, the project also imagines and embodies possible alternative future trajectories. Phosphate rock is one of the critical raw materials identified by the EU that FRAUD have been researching in recent years. An essential component in synthetic fertilizers, this finite resource is under increasing demand from intensifying global industrial agriculture, and it plays a central role in the degradation of soils and waterways. The biggest concentration of phosphate on Earth is in Morocco, Western Sahara, a territory deeply affected by ongoing European colonial legacies and the displacement of the local indigenous people, the Saharawi. To address the site’s historiographic invisibility, FRAUD has, since 2020, been gathering archival material on the extractive practices in the region. This enquiry has now led them to Siilinjärvi in Finland, the site of the only active phosphate mine in Europe. As part of their Saari residency, FRAUD set out to organize a trip to Siilinjärvi with the other residents. The mine, owned by the Norwegian mining giant Yara, was, however, unwilling to welcome the artists and the Saari Residence for a guided visit. FRAUD decided to go there nevertheless, stating: It is rare nowadays that city dwellers, or even people in rural areas, have access to a mining site unless they work in it. Satellite imagery can sometimes be blurred, obfuscating even the view from above. These sites are becoming more and more “invisible.” In 2024, the Siilinjärvi mine still appears in Google maps, which is largely what permitted us to navigate our visit without the help of the staff at the mine. Certainly, the map was out of date, and as a result we were nearly unable to exit a road which had since been closed. That said, it did afford the general exploration of the area immediately surrounding the mine’s fenced perimeter. Our visit consisted of driving around this perimeter as long as possible. We mostly encountered several dozens of kilometers of tall fences in front of towering piles of aggregate, acting like a second layer of fence, especially around the “lakes.” We dubbed them the poison lakes. Mostly they are filled with the chemical by-product of phosphate rock refining, such as sulfuric acid. These acidic basins leach out in small streams, which we drove past. We stopped to explore one of them and found an “environmental monitoring station” lodged onto what looked like a metal barrel. The stream was a colour that is difficult to describe, a colour we had never seen before, with cloudlike shapes floating around the otherwise barren stream, and a smell which made us feel nauseous for about an hour even after driving away. We never saw the lakes themselves, only the leaching streams. There are farms, humans and non-humans living nearby, what a privilege to be able to drive away from this toxicity. Once we approached the mining area, one of the open pits where phosphate is dug out, we could see quite clearly. This pit is sizeable, and so are the machines, and therefore it inspires a sort of geo-technological sublime. A few kilometers from the factory lies a gargantuesque pile of white substance, tall like a small mountain. Here we arrived at the pinnacle of awe-inspiring landscapes. Its incommensurable beauty filled us with dread. The phosphate mountain seems strategically placed next to the main road where anyone passing through this part of Finland would drive through. The Yara corporation stands proud with its logo within this vista. What is made visible in this context explicitly foregrounds the sublime and obfuscates the toxic. Even though we took much photographic and video documentation, we are not interested in recirculating these images of the decontextualized awe-inducing phosphate mountain. Our purpose was not to document but rather to think with and through a place. How can we understand extraction on this scale if we do not walk its never-ending perimeter, smell its leaching acid fumes, or witness the areas of destruction which exist in communities simultaneously bound to mining for their livelihoods? Can we think with a place without it having imprinted us? The impacts of mining spread along the waterways, far beyond the sites of extraction. Phosphate originating most likely from both the Bou Craa mine in Western Sahara and Siilinjärvi is now leaching from fields into the streams and rivers around the Baltic Sea, with the increasing rainfall (due to climate change) amplifying the process. FRAUD recently attended to these flows at the critical ecological boundary zone in Kattegat, Denmark, where the Baltic Sea meets the North Sea. During their residency time at Saari, FRAUD’s new body of work, Phosphopraxis: Nutrients are not Neutral, was presented on the Anholt ferry, which traverses the waters in this region. They continue to work with scientists in the UK to develop modes of sensing and making sense of the circulations of phosphate, such as through the use of phosphorescent pigments. On Sept 2024, Saari residents visited the mine in Pargas (Parainen), accompanied by Ilppo Vuorinen and CAA (Taru Elfving and Lotta Petronella) to ‘underground’ many of the conversations around the re-circularity of phosphate and limestone. From Forests to Timber and Carbon I first met FRAUD over gelato in Venice in 2017. They had just arrived from Finland with freshly made ice cream, flavoured with pine tar, in their suitcase as part of their work Carbon Derivatives. Soon after, they returned to Helsinki for a residency at HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme, where they continued their investigation into the intricate entanglements of Finnish forestry with the history of colonial resource extraction and trade, as well as the current financialization of forests in global carbon markets. They began this extensive research journey by following the historical flows of pine tar from the northeastern Kainuu region in Finland, a remote corner of the Swedish and Russian Empires at the time in the 1600-1800s, through the port of Oulu (a small town that grew into a significant economic hub thanks to the tar trade) and across the Baltic Sea. That highly valued “Stockholm tar” arguably sealed the global success of the maritime fleets of Great Britain, together with the tall masts, a.k.a. “the King’s trees,” which were also harvested from northern forests. FRAUD focuses on the specificities of the sites they work with, and from this situated viewpoint they trace far-reaching connections, both geographically and historically. The premise in their work on forests has been that the valuation of forest resources has laid the foundations for Western political power, capitalism and colonialism. Their work has delved into the history of financial speculation, for example, in the records of insurance companies that map out the unfathomable amount of shipwreck timber lying at the bottom of the sea around the UK. Salvaging some of the sunken wood from the river Thames estuary, FRAUD weighed it to establish its value according to the carbon markets in the installation Carbon Rifts, which thus made tangible the fluctuations of value in the markets and their abstraction from actual ecological planetary boundaries. FRAUD ‘Carbon Rifts – Sunken Forests,’ in Complex Value$, installation overview, 13-24 June 2018, Somerset House Studios, commissioned by the London Community Foundation and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts. The global fluctuation in the value of tar, then again, has been linked to both the rise of the bourgeoisie in Oulu and the famines in Kainuu. They critique the commodification of pine tar today as, for example, tar souvenirs and festivals detach the local history of tar from its economic, political and social impacts. The tar ice cream mimics this contemporary appropriation of material histories and as an artistic intervention lures its consumers into a more complex narrative that they literally embody. Our chance encounter over tar ice cream led me, with FRAUD, to a shipyard in Turku, where the museum ship Sigyn was under restoration. Exposed to the elements out on the yard, we discovered the abandoned old masts that would become the key protagonists in a new work. The majestic Sigyn had, in its day, sailed the oceans as a trade vessel. Yet, its masts were material witnesses not only to these historic circulations but also to their ecological impacts. When the masts needed replacing, suitably tall and strong enough pine trees could no longer be found in Finland, except in highly protected small patches of old-growth forests. Alongside extensive archival research, FRAUD emphasizes the significance of on-site fieldwork and hands-on experimentation with traditional crafts, acknowledging both field study practices and craft skills as sources of knowledge intimately connected to the materials. Sigyn’s old masts guided them to collaborate with carpenters and boat builders in designing and building the Midsummer Mast (Onoma, Fiskars 2020; Contemporary Art Archipelago [CAA], Turku 2021). In the project, they proposed salvage as a way to reclaim not only materials but also ecologically situated knowledge and skills and, moreover, forgotten political and social dimensions of traditions. Midsummer Mast also reanimated the largely obscured history of the maypole tradition, with its origins in the commons and local connections to boat building. The work further evolved into a permanent public installation, Fields of May, which revives the role maypoles played in Europe prior to the privatization of communal lands as public stages for the people’s court, where misusers of power could be put on trial. Commissioned by CAA for the Archipelago Research Institute on the island of Seili, the work now functions as infrastructure for chairing transdisciplinary gatherings around ecological matters. It has so far hosted, among others, a witness seminar by FRAUD, which brought together long-term environmental research of the Institute, legal and humanities scholars, and artists to address the ecological degradation of the Baltic Sea (2022). As part of the work, a Baltic herring windsock is raised in the flagpole during events as an homage to both the ongoing decades-long herring research and the fish itself, which has been a key companion species in the formation of human cultures on these Northern shores. Witness seminar at the Archipelago Research Institute, 2022. Curated by Contemporary Art Archipelago (CAA). Photographs by Taru Elfving, Ilppo Vuorinen and FRAUD. Montage by FRAUD Follow the Herring The herring also reminds us of the necessity to rethink not only the social functions of traditions but also their relations to the rest of nature. The systematic enclosure and thus separation of lands, both forests and fields, from communal use went hand in hand with the suppression of age-old animistic beliefs and practices. FRAUD emphasize the need to recentre values that are irreducible to calculations and speculations in order to acknowledge all the immeasurable and irreplaceable in the world that are fast becoming incalculable losses as the climate breakdown accelerates. The witness seminar is a particular method that brings together and records different perspectives on a matter at hand. FRAUD have used the format to foster diverse forms of knowledge, and to gather and listen to each other. This reflects how they see the potential of research-based art practices and their role as artists – as catalysts, mediators and in providing a situated platform for conversations and meaning-making that the contemporary structures of knowledge production, disciplinary boundaries and systems of value do not accommodate. Moreover, they are concerned about financialization and automation taking over everywhere, including in research and education. During their residency at Saari, FRAUD continued their dialogue with the Archipelago Research Institute to further understand the unsustainable circulations of phosphate in the Baltic Sea area – and the unsustainability of the solutions offered to the problem as witnessed at the limestone quarry: more mining and intensified global circulation of matter and capital to combat the devastation caused by mining and intensified global circulation of matter and capital. They also returned to questions concerning the significance of fieldwork practices in long-term study of environmental changes: what might be the invaluable aspects of fieldwork that will become incalculable losses when methods change and the scientist no longer spends time on site due to the increased automation of data collection? Like in the financialization of forests and carbon, in automation and modelling, the relationship between knowledge and place gets severed. This is what FRAUD hopes to further direct their attention to in the future: As a result of our visits to the phosphate and lime mines during the Saari residency, alongside our ongoing work with CAA with/in Seili, we are thinking about the importance of the embodied nature of knowledge production. Thinking with place but also knowing through place. Over the years, we have become fascinated with basic science and the longstanding time series of data it has produced. In the current context of hype around AI automation, it is important to remember the key role of the body in data sensing and analysis. In discussion with the scientists working in Seili, it becomes clear that it is their longstanding engagement with the island that affords their ability to analyze the different data streams. The data makes sense to them because they have been walking these shores repetitively over the years, noticing, observing, smelling, feeling and digesting the changes. It is this epistemic continuum between the anecdotical and the evidentiary that we are extremely attracted to. We wondered whether this is discussed in marine biology fieldcourses, and how can this be taught? Professor Ilppo Vuorinen, former director of the Archipelago Research Institute, shared with us how he used to teach the importance of note taking in field research, using daily log books attuned to all the changes he noticed. When reading the data collected through the instruments in the lab months later, the notebooks can reveal connections, make sense of, and indicate which variables might be compared to uncover clues about complex relations. It is, after all, such an embodied practice logged in the notebooks which enabled the researchers at the institute to understand the relationship between rainfall and eutrophication in the Baltic, a major finding. The act of noticing and paying close attention is also crucial to art practices such as Investigative Aesthetics. This will hopefully be the subject of the next witnessing seminar: how we might exchange between different practitioners on how data annotation is practiced and taught, and how embodied knowledge operates across scientific methods and investigative aesthetics. Image sent to FRAUD by Taru Elfving, denoting the face of extremely rare limestone vein connecting Pargas (Parainen), and the island of Seili. Although remote and brutally segregated throughout history, a fine line of chalk seems to anchor the shores of these two islands.