The Fallen Clouds project explores the metaphor of a cloud as a way to connect two contemporary issues: the growing expansion of digital infrastructures and the climate crisis, crossed by forms of historical extractivism in certain territories. The project locates the ethico-political tensions between technological development and the eco-social crisis in three critical digital zones and infrastructures in Chile: a submarine Internet cable extended in the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, the new Google data centre in Cerrillos, and the carbonate plants of lithium in the Atacama salt flat. In each territory, the project authors engage with different beings affected by the presence of these infrastructures: from crabs in the submarine bottom to an ecofeminist group in Santiago and Lickanantay women in Atacama.

The Fallen Clouds film

The Fallen Clouds features a film composed of images of these different beings and the diverse processes happening around the digital infrastructures. The film narrative starts with a submarine observation of a new fibre optic cable extending throughout the coasts of the Pacific Ocean in Chile. It then follows the activist actions of MOSACAT (Movimiento Socioambiental Comunitario por el Agua y el Territorio) – an ecofeminist group organised against the installation of a new Google data centre in Cerrillos that would use 169 litres of water per second to cool down its servers. Finally, the film observes the extraction of lithium in the Atacama salt flat from the perspective of a geologist and three Lickanantay women: a girl, a woman, and an elder.

The film sound is recorded using different sound artefacts, from direct sound captures to contact and hydrophone microphones. Experimenting with sound tactilities allows the creation of viscous and electric sound compositions that support the narration of different myths, as told by MOSACAT and the Lickanantay women. From these materials, a ‘cloud symphony’ is born. The symphony is played through floating sound sculptures created with the materials gathered around the three infrastructures explored, including a salt flat crust, water pipes from the lithium extractive sites, dried seaweeds from around the fibre optic cable, and a piece of a fibre optic cable itself.

Each piece is connected to a speaker or to a transductor, generating a vibrating sound composition of The Fallen Clouds. This visual, sonic and material experience allows viewers to immerse themselves in a trance-like journey to break the spell of the cloud, inviting them to take a different perspective on digital technologies and imagine other possible futures connected to circular temporalities as well as interspecies and intercultural affective relations based on mutual care.

Filming & fieldwork

Prior to the film shoot, the authors conducted fieldwork in the three main locations. In January 2022, the fieldwork research took place in Cerrillos, at the territory where the new Data Center of Google will be located. The group worked with MOSACAT on the scriptwriting process in order to better understand their needs, demands, and desires connected to the film.

In February 2022, the group traveled to San Pedro de Atacama to attune to the local territory and generate collaborative bonds with local communities (who were previously familiarised with the project). These encounters involved a meeting with Karenn Vera Tito – a Lickanantay woman and educational mediator, and Juan Carmelo – a traditional environmentalist educator and a fellow friend of Karenn from the same indigenous community. The Fallen Clouds authors made a ritual of asking permission from the land and the ancestors to start developing the project and visited the land of their ancient abuelos (great-grandparents).

In April 2022, the group worked at the Lickanantay school of Río Grande with Ashley, the only ten-year-old student of the school, and her teacher Isabel Tito along with the traditional educator Juana Anza and artist Andrea Vera. Together with Karenn Vera Tito who acted as the educational mediator of the process, they applied different ludic dynamics to create a myth connecting the idea of the ‘cloud’ and its local socio-environmental resonances with the Lickanantay cosmovisions.

The filming continued in the Atacama Desert, starting in San Pedro de Atacama, a town located 2,408 metres above sea level. The work involved members of the Lickanantay community of Río Grande in the Chaxa lake, a place characterised by a rich and unique ecosystem and a sacred site for the local indigenous communities (the site is currently administered by the Toconao community, who kindly allowed the access to film in this place). The filming then continued in the centre of the Atacama salt flat close to the lithium extractive sites.

Film editing & installation

In May, the group followed the installation of the new submarine fibre optic cable Prat owned by the local telecommunications company, GTD, and recorded sounds at the seashore of the Pacific Ocean to capture the audio textures of places around the submarine cable. The film editing started in June 2022 and was followed with the construction of the final atmospheric installation.

During the fieldwork and filming process, the different materials that make up the ‘cloud’ were collected – algae, salt flat crust and water pipes used for lithium extraction. Different sound artefacts were used to create the vibrant cloud composition, including speakers of different sizes and transducers, accompanied by diverse fabric materials and other equipment to hang all the objects and speakers to create the final immersive art installation.

The installation including the film was exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (September 2022).

Refuge for Resurgence presents a four-meter-long table, hand-made in Didcot (UK) from the wood of a wild Surrey oak tree in collaboration with Gareth Huw Lewis of Classic Watercraft. Placed around the table are fourteen wooden stools, each one carefully customised to suit its intended occupant. As the viewer enters the space, they are beckoned by a bespoke soundscape, a chorus recital of a poem that brings the story of the banquet, and its mythological origin story, powerfully to life.

The banquet attendees represent a cross-section of life on a resurgent Earth; inclusive of species that were once domesticated, or might have been considered ‘weeds’, ‘pests’ or ‘vermin’ under human domination, but are now reclaiming their rightful place in the ecological order. Around this table, three humans – man, woman and child – join a fox, rat, wasp, pigeon, cow, wild boar, snake, beaver, wolf, raven and mushroom.

Each creature has a place set at the table, but only the wasp, mushroom and raven (in taxidermied form) physically join the installation. By exploring each place around the table, the viewer can infer the identity of the guests from finely detailed clues on display. These include species-symbolic cutlery, hand-crafted from materials foraged from a former world (avian bones, brake lights, twigs, a rusted circuit board or telephone wire); food offerings carefully catered for each guest; and ceramic plates meticulously illustrated by illustrator Nicola Ferrao with mythopoetic scenes depicting the species protagonists and their narrative journeys, from destruction to resurgence.

“We’re drawing on ideas of folklore, mythology, the transformative potential of ritual and ceremony. We want to open up poetic aspects of other worlds that might feel enigmatic – or even magical. This is an invocation and a prayer for a different kind of world.”

– Jon Ardern, co-founder, Superflux

The table sits beneath a trio of suspended LCD screens that form a triptych window onto the world outside. Created by designer Sebastien Tiew, the windows reveal a cityscape in the aftermath of catastrophe – streets are flooded, buildings lie in ruins, the urban fabric lies shredded – but the vision is far from dystopian.

Green plants and trees are creeping in to reclaim the city, and the wildlife that was previously barred from human spaces is finding its way back to the streets and making a new home. From the perspective of the creatures at the banquet, nature is building a new world from the wreckage of the old. Their task is to work together and find their respective places within it.

“Our proposal for a way out of this dilemma is to completely change the way we view ourselves and our relationship with nature. Instead of seeing humans as separate from nature, we need to understand that we are a part of it. By radically changing our attitude toward natural systems and the ecology of our planet, we have the best chance to reverse the damage we’ve done. How might we – humans and non-humans – truly engage in collaborative living?”

– Anab Jain, co-founder, Superflux

The Refuge for Resurgence installation and conceptual background were captured in a short film released by Superflux in July 2021. The intention here was to give remote viewers an immersive experience akin to being within the exhibition space. The film was showcased at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022). After its initial showcase at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Refuge for Resurgence installation appeared at the following exhibitions: Subject to Change, Droog Gallery, Amsterdam (February – April 2022), Weather Engines, Onassis Stegi, Athens (April – May 2022) and Our Time on Earth, Barbican Curve Gallery, London (May – August 2022). 

Invocation for Hope invites humanity to reassess its place in the natural world. To emerge from the ashes of fire-blackened trees into resurgent greenery – and a glistening pool with a surprise below the surface. The vast, immersive installation examines the complex interconnected relationships throughout the natural world, and raises the possibility of a more-than-human future – a post-anthropocentric planet in which humanity is just one part of a dynamic and multifaceted ecosystem. Audiences are invited to travel through a grid of burnt and blackened pines, salvaged from a recent wildfire, towards a resurgent living forest at its center, where multiple species living in harmony with humanity offer a promise of a new way of living.

In this cradle of biodiversity, you come to a freshwater pool, which reflects, not your own face, but another creature – a bison, an otter, a bird of prey – coming to the water to drink. The pool is surrounded by a cluster of nearly thirty different living trees, including oak, hornbeam, apple, silver birch, and mounds of biodiversity where mosses, grasses, lichens and shrubs grow symbiotically together over the course of the installation. These living ecologies are nourished by regular watering, grow lamps, and natural light from the large skylight on the museum ceiling.

Accompanied by a soundscape created by visionary musician Cosmo Sheldrake, the installation leads viewers one by one on a personal journey from the ravages of the climate crisis to the possibility of renewal and a deeper connection with nature. Wild maples, oaks, birches, and larches spring up and around mosses, ferns, and lichens. Sounds of bird and animal orchestras begin to fill the forest.

With the pool in its heart, this resurgent forest gives visitors the chance to reflect on their place in this more-than-human world – a part of the planet, not masters of it. Encouraging people to reflect on our fragile, interconnected relationship with the natural world, Invocation for Hope explores opportunities to create practices of more-than-human care for our climate-altered futures through ideas around resurgence, redistribution, reparation, and rewilding.

Superflux considers the climate crisis to be what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject – a phenomenon of such spatial and temporal scale that it is beyond the capacity of the human mind to fully grasp it. Invocation for Hope explores the complexity of climate change as a hyperobject, making it resonant and meaningful and finding pathways of hope amid disaster. The starting point for the installation is the idea that climate change is the inevitable result of a worldview that sees nature as an exploitable resource rather than a complex and interconnected system of life.

“Climate change is not a problem we can ‘solve’ but rather a predicament we must navigate with responsibility and urgency.”

Jon Ardern, co-founder Superflux

The creation of Invocation for Hope required the installation of more than 400 trees within the MAK. In collaboration with the forestry and fire departments of Austria’s Neunkirchen region, trees that had been burned in a recent wildfire were salvaged and transported to the museum. One of the main contributors to the spread of wildfires is an approach to forestry that prioritises monoculture as a means of maximising yield – single-species forests burn faster. As the result of a human attempt to exert control over nature, the fire-blackened forest serves as a synecdoche for anthropogenic climate change as a whole.

The trees in the installation are arranged in a symmetric grid so, as the viewer passes through them to the living oasis at the centre of the installation, they move from an imposed, rigid order to the organic exuberance of nature. The pool at the centre is surrounded by a cluster of nearly thirty different living trees, including oak, hornbeam, apple, silver birch, and mounds of biodiversity where mosses, grasses, lichens and shrubs will grow symbiotically together over the course of the installation. These living ecologies are nourished by regular watering, grow lamps and natural light from the large skylight on the museum ceiling. 

Superflux’s practice does not merely consider ways of avoiding climate crisis but looks beyond ecological collapse, into the more-than-human future. Invocation of Hope can thus be seen as a companion piece to the studio’s other CreaTures ExP and contribution to La Biennale di Venezia 2021: Refuge for Resurgence. Superflux explores the relationship and impact of man and the environment through its mytho-poetic framework: Instead of a direct representation of the dynamics of this relationship, the installation takes a more abstract and symbolic position.

“Our proposal for a way out of this dilemma is to completely change the way we view ourselves and our relationship with nature. Instead of seeing humans as separate from nature, we need to understand that we are a part of it. By radically changing our attitude toward natural systems and the ecology of our planet, we have the best chance to reverse the damage we’ve done. How might we – humans and non-humans – truly engage in collaborative living?”

Anab Jain, co-founder Superflux

In keeping with the message of the work and the theme of the Biennale, every component of the installation was designed to live on after the event, with the aim of neutralising the carbon footprint made during its development and implementation. Once the Biennale ended in October 2022, the living trees were donated to schools. The burnt trees were used as compost for a garden of contemplation in Vienna, helping to enrich the biodiversity of the urban landscape – a lasting reminder of the web of interdependence that underpins all life on earth. The hope of Superflux is that this space continues, in the same way as the installation did, to be a place for people to reconsider and reflect on their relationship to nature. 

Superflux also produced a short film of the exhibition, with the intention of giving remote viewers an experience akin to being within the exhibition space. The film was released in July 2021 and distributed widely. The film was also showcased at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain from June to July 2022. 

In November 2020 – April 2021, the Baltic Sea Lab occupied a large abandoned retail space of the A Bloc shopping centre in Otaniemi (Espoo, FIN). The space hosted a multi-sensory seaweed structure named Hidaka Ohmu, originally designed by Julia Lohmann and the Department of Seaweed for the World Economic Forum in 2020. The sculpture made of Japanese kelp facilitates conversations and alliances by bringing the sea, its materiality, texture, and scents into a human-made environment. Fellow artists and researchers, including the Open Forest collective, were working inside and around the Ohmu for a period of six months and invited other interested creatures for one-to-one dialogues.

After moving out from the A Bloc space, the Hidaka Ohmu sculpture traveled to a new venue, the Glasshouse Helsinki, where it was exhibited in June – August 2021, as part of the gallery’s ongoing initiative to promote art-science dialogues.

The Baltic Sea Lab project followed with two co-creative engagement events, delving deep into the concept of ocean literacy to better understand the needs of the local sea. Partnering with local Finnish institutions like the John Nurmisen Foundation, the Hanaholmen, and the Tvärminne Zoological Station, the Lab invited conversations with artists and designers about various ways of engaging communities with local sea and surrounding environment.

The event at the Tvärminne station, which is situated at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, involved playful explorations of the local seascape including diving, gathering algae samples and studying tiny bubbles in the gut weed, as well as a panel discussion ‘Baltic Sea Lab: How creative practices can support sea health’ . The panel invited six panelists: author of the ECOtarot deck and Arizona State University professor Adriene Jenik; founders of the Ocean Confessional initiative Sam Shamsher and Pete Fung; author of the Selkie Skin project Gary Markle; researcher and artists Iryna Zamuruieva from Flood Risk Scotland, and the Baltic Sea Lab’s very own Julia Lohmann to reflect on contemporary themes and issues in ocean literacy.

The goal of the panel was to identify ocean literacy topics that need to be addressed from a scientific point of view and, alongside it, to understand how creative practices create engagements with relevant individuals and communities. The insightful conversations prompted reflections on the challenges of scaling and reproducing artistic practices and on the nature of an effective engagement.

Three interwoven and recurring topics from the events were developed into three pillars of ocean literacy. These aim at understanding how creative practices engage a community with ocean literacy through: Knowledge (awareness of ecological and cultural issues), Care (empathy, emotional and embodied connection), and Action (active participation, agency). A Baltic Sea Lab installation capturing the three pillars was showcased at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June 2021) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures showcase (September – October 2022).

In August 2022, another co-creative event A Moment with the Sea event followed with a less structured form of reflection, inviting individuals and communities to spend a moment thinking about and with the Baltic sea. In celebration of Itämeripäivä – Baltic Sea Day – the event called for messages of love, concern, gratitude, confession, and/or fear for the sea to be sent and written with chalk onto rocks along the Baltic shoreline.

The lead project author Julia Lohmann presented the Baltic Sea Lab project and related themes in ocean literacy at the New European Bauhaus Dialogues – Arctic Design Week event (March 2021) and later at the Bauhaus of the Seas conference, as part of the New European Bauhaus initiative – Roundtable ‘Transformative Economies: Ecosocial Wellbeing and the Politics of Participation’ (May 2021). In June 2021, the Baltic Sea Lab ExP team contributed some of their seaweed artifacts, including the beautiful KombuKamui dress, to the Archive of Vibrant Matter, as part of the Porto Design Biennale in Portugal. Another seaweed artifact, the large sculpture named Kombu Ahtola, was shown at the exhibition The World As We Don’t Know It, organised at the Droog Design space, Netherlands. The exhibition curated by Renny Ramakers features 20 international artists presenting their visions on the climate crisis.

In September 2021, Baltic Sea Lab authors unveiled the Seaweed Shrine – a collective sculpture documenting ongoing practice-based research and exploration into algae and seaweeds conducted together with students and staff at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. The Shrine co-authors connect their expertise in design, marine biology, and chemistry to engage audiences with themes in ocean literacy, material development, and the agency of seaweed. Exhibited as part of the Helsinki Design Week 2021, the Shrine aims to alter and foster people’s capacities to care for their surroundings while attending to more-than-human values and interests.

The Nocturne project has unfolded as an experiment in care-taking and intimacy with the more-than-human world. The network of Nocturne altars operates as an economy of care – visitors to the interventions are responsible for upholding the integrity of the site, both in the more-than-human species that inhabit it, as well as in care-taking of the altars. The practice of generating new rituals with non-human species serves as a method of re-localization, de-emphasizing the human-human connection, and re-emphasizing the grounding impacts of more-than-human interactions. 

The Nocturne lanterns were created using an adaptation of the Akari process of bamboo paper lamp making in Japan: following the Akari tradition, the lanterns are made of foam-core, saran wrap, string, and painted beeswax. Combined into altars, the lanterns each spark a distinct sensorial experience: the way the sunlight backlights a native plant species at sunset; the sound of the birdsong at sunrise; the scent of jasmine leaves opening as the day cools into night. 

The first public showcase of the Nocturne altars within the CreaTures project took place during the Wild Altars: Radio Walk Stairs installation situated in the artist’s local neighbourhood in Silverlake, Los Angeles (March – August 2021). The work was presented as a ‘wild’ outdoors intervention inviting casual and serendipitous encounters. Near to home, such interventions slip into existing ecologies, opening a temporary space for new ceremonies and eco-rituals, beckoning humans to slow down and pay attention to the special arrangements of elements and lives around them. 

“This pause and break in their typical movement patterns and speed are meant to lead to a moment of deeper observation of the network of more-than-human species around them. Generating this embodied experience aligns with relocalization practices, and subverts the hierarchy of intellectual versus embodied knowledge present in Western epistemologies. To come back to our bodies is to come home, and in this case to come back to the more-than-human entanglements that we are a part of. “

– Isabel Beavers (2021)

QR codes at the site of the altars enabled members of the public to learn about the work, the artist, and reach out if they wanted. The received communication was positive and full of gratitude. The general response was an appreciation for having art in the neighbourhood, and an appreciation of the message. The altar stayed up on the stairs for about a year.

One of the original ideas that Isabel had was to undertake a daily or weekly ritual of visiting the altar and taking a few quiet moments to sit on the steps and listen to, and feel, the elements around her. The ritual evolved over time as she visited the altar less and less. As she prepared to create a further altar on a different staircase, it seemed that a new ritual might involve building a new altar each year, both locally and in more remote locations.

A critical part of the Nocturne project are the social processes involved in co-creating altars and eco-rituals together. There were two workshops organised throughout the course of the project: the first titled Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals workshop at the CreaTures Feral track at the 2021 Uroboros festival (May 2021, online) and the second Co-Creating Wild Altars organised at CultureHub’s ReFest: Reunification (March 2022, Los Angeles).

The Uroboros workshop was structured as a design hack: participants from many parts of the globe were broken up into small groups to brainstorm how they might create a wild altar: what materials they would use, where the altar be placed, what eco-rituals would emerge from the intervention. The workshop was accompanied by a Discord channel to encourage dialogue and communication post-workshop.

The second workshop at ReFest involved twelve participants creating their own small lanterns at the artist’s home studio in Los Angeles. Participants learned the process of creating these wax sculptures and took their creations to place in their own home environments, dedicating them to new eco-rituals they hoped to enact.

Following on the Wild Altars, Beavers created a multimedia installation Nocturne: Sea Altar incorporating audio, audio-reactive visuals, and seven light sculptures to honour the ocean, inviting visitors to engage in a practice of deep listening to ask: what are more-than-humans telling us?

The Sea Altar was showcased at the Atmospheres Deep exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (Monterey, California; May – July 2021), at Sui Generis: Debates about the Singular exhibition in the SOLA Contemporary (Los Angeles, California; January 2022), and at the Symbiosis: Sculpting the Art of Living Together exhibition in CultureHub (Los Angeles, July 2022). 

The Nocturne project was further exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures project showcase (September – October 2022). Accompanying the altars, the Cooler Planet exhibition also unveiled a short film The Sky Has Not Yet Fallen showing conceptual background of the Nocturne project: