Wonder and the Environment: Waters of Hypoxic Slime and Tropic Lime at Kogo Gallery 

Written by Francesca Arnavas 

1. We are the environment

Harold Fromm writes that “the ‘environment’, as we now apprehend it, runs through us in endless waves”.¹  We exist in the environment, nature and culture are strongly and indissolubly intertwined. Kristina Õllek’s exhibition “Waters of Hypoxic Slime and Tropic Lime” at Kogo Gallery, in Tartu, is a fascinating and thought-provoking testimony of this “trans-corporeality”² in which the boundaries of what is natural and what is cultural are recognised as blurred and complex. In Õllek’s provocative book Filter Feeders, Double Binds and Other Blooms, it is written “we breath microhistories, microworlds, microplastics, microbodies”³  – we are constantly affected by the natural world surrounding us and we affect it constantly: this process is inevitable. The windows of the exhibition’s room are covered with green bioplastic, mimicking the effects of the overgrown cyanobacteria on the Baltic Sea’s waters, and stressing how this deeply impacts our everyday lives, even if we are unaware of it. Cyanobacteria have a profound influence on our lives, since they perform oxygenic photosynthesis – they are responsible for the oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans and are among the first and most ancient life forms: the oxygenic photosynthesis they perform “has enabled the oxygenation of oceanic and terrestrial niches, and the diversification of complex life”⁴. On the other hand, human agency affects the life and behaviour of cyanobacteria too, and this is particularly evident in the Baltic Sea, where fertilisers, pollution, inadequate water treatment, rising sea temperature, all cause an increase in cyanobacteria blooms, which in turn creates the so called “dead zones”, or “hypoxic” areas: algal blooms prevent light from reaching the water’s surface and oxygen from being absorbed by marine organisms, resulting in the death of many of them and in several possible consequent damages to human beings as well. Some strains of cyanobacteria produce toxins that can be harmful to humans and animals if ingested or touched (cyanotoxins). 

Õllek’s work is concerned with representing this interdependence of environmental factors and human actions, through artworks that are in themselves a compenetration of nature and art: she employs actual limestone, water from the Baltic Sea, and sea salt in the creation of her pieces. The ten pieces in the exhibition’s room are not only in themselves an actual material combination of organic and inorganic elements but they also conceptually convey the idea of a marine landscape in which the natural and geological is interconnected with human actions and lives. For instance, three of the pieces, placed in dialogue with each other, represent the effects of the over-blooming of cyanobacteria in the Baltic Sea, by showing a print surface covered with a fluorescent green pigment, framed, as in a painting, with sea salt, and suspended with a “marine chain”. Two other artworks are a sort of sculptural ensemble combining a plastic water bottle as the ones we find in offices with a framed photo of a fossil from the Silurian ages (when Estonia was actually a tropical area, located next to the equator), held by a tablet holder that establishes an almost organic connection between the water and the photo– the bottles are filled with water the artist collected from the Baltic Sea, which shows signs of greenish (cyanobacteria) elements in it. The central piece is a cage-like structure in which the grid is encrusted with sea-salt tinged in green, and the cover is a big digital image showing the sea, the overgrown cyanobacteria, and jellyfish floating. The title is “On the Floating Sea with Cyanobacteria, Squishy Jellies and Silicon Solar Panels” because the cyanobacteria are represented with the colour and texture of solar panels: this visual simile stresses the fact that as solar panels block the sunrays, so cyanobacteria, if overgrown, prevent the light from reaching the marine life underneath. A particularly interesting detail – one that visitors have actually to pay a lot of attention to spot! – is that in some of the pieces their own titles are embedded with letters on the artwork’s surface, and these letters mimic the shape and form of cyanobacteria. As this description clearly shows, Õllek’s pieces offer an elaborated meditation on the numerous and complex links between human lives and environmental factors, emphasizing similarities and connections between human artifacts and bacteria, between human agency and geological transformations: the world is “a dynamic reciprocity between subject and milieu, where the voice blends with the environment and the environment in turn stories the subject into its materiality”⁵, as Jeff Diamanti points out in the final essay placed at the end of Õllek’s book. 

2. Transformations, New Materialism, Bodies of Water 

Stacy Alaimo, whose theoretical perspective informs Õllek’s artistic vision and writings, highlights how the interchanges and transits between human bodies and nonhuman natures occur in “material interconnections”⁶, and she connects the materiality of this pervasive exchange to a cognitive state of concern and wonder: the material constitutes “the emergent, ultimately unmappable landscapes of interacting biological, climatic, economic, and political forces”⁷. In Õllek’s exhibition, the material elements and their textures emerge as shaping a metamorphic world: what the different artworks seem to repeatedly stress is the constant dynamic transformations affecting the material manifestations of the world – nature and culture alike. The paces of these changes are multiple ones: a Silurian period’s Borealis limestone dates back to 440 million years ago, and it took it an enormous amount of time to fossilise, while alterations to the environment brought about by human actions are on the one hand much more recent, on the other their pace is often much faster. The so-called “new materialism” claims to dismantle the traditional conception that matter is subordinate to a rational action (both in the general sense of human manipulation, and in the more specific sense of the artistic practice), emphasising the concept of “agential matter”⁸. “Neo-materialism questions the anthropocentric narrative that has underpinned our view of humans-in-the-world since the enlightenment”⁹, and “Waters of Hypoxic Slime and Tropic Lime” focuses on the dynamicity of the material – it does not deny the influence of human agency, but it aims at showing how materiality impacts and shapes that agency. This is also a meta-reflection on the artistic practice itself, which is a human intervention on material elements, but it is also influenced by those elements: “various bodies”¹⁰ are involved in the creation of an artistic piece.  What is also worth noticing is the particular attention to watery elements, “bodies of water”, that informs Õllek’s art. The peculiar materiality of water is especially symbolic, considering its shapeless, ever-changing, ever-moving essence, and also considering that we as human beings are in large part made of water. In this sense, in the exhibition at Kogo gallery, as well as in many others of her artistic realisations, Õllek provides a material manifestation of Astrida Neimanis’s provocative reflections as explained in her Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, a work often referred to in Õllek’s book. Neimanis talks about our embodiment in the world from the perspective of our watery constitution, linking this with pressing ecological concerns. “We live at the site of exponential material meaning where embodiment meets water”¹¹ states Neimanis, and Õllek’s art employs water both in a symbolic, conceptual sense, pointing towards the metamorphic and interconnected essence of the world, and in a more material and practical sense, incorporating water in her art pieces. 

3. “What does it have to do with beauty?”¹²

There are definitive ethical implications in showcasing the impact of pollution and other human-related activities on the overgrowth of cyanobacteria in the Baltic Sea. Nevertheless, Õllek’s artworks offer more a representation of this impact, together with representations of other environmental changes and permutations, than taking a specifically active polemical stance. What this exhibition provides is a meditation on our environment-affected and affecting, metamorphic, watery, natural and cultural existence in the world, stressing how the artistic medium can give us additional tools to understand and feel about it. “Concern and wonder” are the open-ended cognitive responses Õllek’s art elicits, making us ponder on the mysterious and complex interconnections we constantly establish with our environment. Art expresses beauty in various, multiform ways, and with multiple possible effects: it does not provide us with fixed and undisputable answers, but it opens up the path for questions, doubts, surprise, astonishment, wonder, and fear. Ambiguity is not a weakness here but a strength, and it is also what characterises many of the phenomena, natural and human, Õllek represents in this exhibition: cyanobacteria are essential part of the oxygen cycle but also creators of hypoxia, solar panels have beneficial effects but they can also colonise yet another space, with other possible negative consequences, fresh salty North Sea water is again of vital importance in the Baltic Sea, but due to strong layering of water, the more saline and therefore denser water often remains on the bottom, isolating it from surface waters and the atmosphere, and it can create other variable “dead zones”; understanding and thinking about this ambiguity is what Õllek’s art is about. Beauty gives us tools for thinking and wondering. 

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¹ Harold Fromm. “The ‘Environment’ Is Us.” Electronic Book Review, Jan. 1, 1997. http://www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev8/r8fromm.html, p. 2.
² Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 12.
3 Angeliki Tzortzakaki, filter feeders and ill-mannered bodies. Kristina Õllek, Filter Feeders, Double Binds and Other Blooms. Lugemik, 2022, p. 76.
⁴ Catherine F. Demoulin et al. “Cyanobacteria evolution: Insight from the fossil record”. Free Radical Biology and Medicine, vol. 40, 2019, p. 206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2019.05.007.
⁵ Jeff Diamanti, “Queer Attachment & Errant Focalization in a Time of Hypoxia”. In Kristina Õllek, Filter Feeders, Double Binds and Other Blooms, p. 96.
⁶ Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, p. 2.
⁷ Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, p. 2.
⁸ Barbara Bolt, “Introduction: Toward a ‘New Materialism’ Through the Arts”. In Barbara Bolt and Estelle Barrett, eds., Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ Through the Arts. Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 4.
⁹ Barbara Bolt, “Introduction: Toward a ‘New Materialism’ Through the Arts”, p. 3.
¹⁰ Barbara Bolt, “Introduction: Toward a ‘New Materialism’ Through the Arts”, p. 7.
¹¹ Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 2.
¹² Angeliki Tzortzakaki, filter feeders and ill-mannered bodies. Kristina Õllek, Filter Feeders, Double Binds and Other Blooms. Lugemik, 2022, p. 76.

The article was written for the Estonian cultural weekly Sirp and was published in Estonian on 2 June 2023