By Maren Richter

 

 

 

Imprisoned by four walls

(To the north, the crystal of non-knowledge

a landscape to be invented

to the south, reflective memory

to the east, the mirror

to the west, stone and the song of silence)

I wrote messages, but received no reply

(Octavio Paz, Envoi)

 

 

 

What will come after what we know to be the twilight years of a liveable earth? This question could be the point of departure for Nadine Baldow’s artistic thought experiments. In the recent years it has become dramatically evident that our false understanding of nature namely as immortal and exploitable (re)sources has caused an immersive ecological crisis of the most overwhelming to have ever faced humanity, and its consequences permeate every domain of life. Earth System scientists have started to re-conceptualise our epoch to express the profound human impact on the earth by the call for a new proposed geological era, the Anthropocene, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, which started with human extractivism and industrialisation. Other scholars believe a more scientifically accurate designation would be the Capitalocene to signify capitalism as a way of organizing nature—as a capitalist world-ecology1. But how do we grasp those regimes, which participate in or accelerate the mutations that extend from financial systems to the biosphere?

Dresden born artist Nadine Baldow searches for ways to imagine those complex impacts of human’s intervention into nature, like in her long-term series ‘Occupied Objects’. Though the artist graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden only in 2018, where she studied fine art after a woodcarving apprenticeship in the Alps, she can look back at an impressively concise body of work, in which she develops a world of ‘humans and nature as opponents in the quest for living space’, as she expresses it. Mutations, contamination, plastic waste, which has penetrated the most far-flung corners of the Earth or toxic microcosms form her topics for creating sculptures in gallery spaces or in public space. ‘Do you know what Nature is?’ was for example an intervention in the zoo of Dresden, in which the artist added artificial toxic looking elements to the ‘natural’ environment in the compounds of animals that may have never seen their de facto natural habitat. But do any of us know what nature is, really? Our definition of nature may be called rather paradoxical. Although humans are part of nature, human activity is often understood as a separate category from other natural phenomena.

 

 

For the site-specific exhibition ‘Pristine Paradise’ at Valletta Contemporary, which Nadine Baldow developed during a one month residency in Gozo, she drew a speculative picture of our future(s) on planet Earth, where it seemed that colourful but obviously parasiting, fungi-like, alien organisms have taken over the planet. We don’t know if those are posthuman species or what exactly happened to humankind in her dystopian ‘paradise’. But evidently the relation between nature and humans has changed fundamentally. Gaudy pink, blue, green biomorphic polyurethane structures growing out of refrigerators, the floor or the table, they float and cover most of the gallery space of Valletta Contemporary. Huge, beautiful and in parts extremely fragile invasive species have made room for themselves. It could have been an attack towards human species or simply that nature reconditioned the planet.

 

 

For sure nature has the capacity to reclaim spaces within a short period of time. And if not that kind of nature, we are used to, then one that can survive or as scientists in multispecies studies research on by exploring ways to bring other species (and ways of thinking) back - with new forms of relationships that constitute both human and nonhuman social worlds. It may be no coincidence that the objects, which Baldow creates meticulously, remind of blown up microorganisms or mushrooms, which are best known as both resilient and sensitive living forms. Fungi have been part of nature on Earth for about the past 400 million years and they are good alarm systems for small and big changes of the ecosystem. Some are able to survive huge catastrophes like the mushroom Pestalotiopsis microspora, which has the ability to digest and break down polyurethane plastic, even in an air-free environment. In her multispecies research ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins’ anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests to look at the so called Matsutake mushroom, which was the first live thing to grow in the charred and blasted landscape of Hiroshima after the Americans dropped an atom bomb on the city. Tsing argues that due to the fact that Matsutake mushrooms cannot be cultivated because they require long term environmental disturbances, “Matsutake forests thus teach us about systems of world making and energy sharing that reach beyond the conceits of farming”2. She concludes: Mushroom lovers must wait patiently for the life processes of fungi within disturbed forests. In this waiting is the beginning of an appreciation for multispecies ecologies and open-ended landscape histories.’ In the logic of multispecies studies Baldow’s posthuman or postnature organisms do not offer necessarily a dystopian scenario only but a different scenario of how we need to look into future concepts of cohabiting the Earth. For her this understanding of the world called by Anna Tsing not without irony as ‘waiting’ for the end of human supremacy over nature might be expressed in her installations by the clear absence of a ‘human nature’.

 

 

However, to speculate on the mutation of botany gives space for potenialities of reflections on our environmental crisis due to a fundamentally false concept of nature as the Other. Already in the early science fictions in the wake of industrialisation and the peak of human colonising it was often the nature, which turned into monstrous danger for human kind. In the plot of H.G. Wells famous ‘The War of the Worlds’ of 1897, an invasion science fiction of Martians taking over the planet Earth, which arose for the author from a discussion about the catastrophic effect of the British coloniser on indigenous Tasmanians, the so called ‘Red Weed’ a fast growing fungal plant from Mars, are overrunning the city of London within a few days. The Martians on Earth are eventually killed by earth- borne bacteria, of which their immune systems couldn't cope. This metaphor even allegory of a battle between humans and aliens, alien nature and human nature, as introduced by Wells, is for the artist an indication of how differences tend to index differentials in agencies. In his book ‘Carbon Democracy’ theorist Timothy Mitchell critically notes: “Human beings are the agents around whose actions and intentions the (hi)story is written.”3 Mitchell relates oil-based forms of democratic politics with the consequences of our collective dependence on oil. He laments that the democratic machineries that emerged to govern the age of carbon energy and consequently the catastrophic climate change seem to be unable to address the processes that may end it.

 

 

This no-way-out scenario, which Mitchell points out, is the inspiration for Nadine’s future scenario. Although the artist shows us a different world, which writes a narrative without human agents, it is also one without an evident judgment. She rather puts herself into the position of a quasi-neutral, speculative observer or an ‘objective’ narrator. Her plots don’t seem to be cruel they just indicate a state to come within the logic of human growth of wealth and of prosperity. It was already 45 years ago that the famous Club of Rome study ‘The Limits to Growth’ (1972) has constituted a striking wake-up call in the midst of the Western narrative of progress, with its impressive warnings about the looming depletion of natural commodities and the catastrophic impact of global environmental destruction coupled with simultaneous population increases and persistent growth in industrial output. Almost half a century later little or nothing has been learnt from those forecasts.

Nadine Baldow developed her exibition during a residency on the island of Gozo. Gozo in many ways could be (still) seen as the better version of the mother island Malta. When Maltese want to see some nature they would go to Gozo. The title of the exhibition ‘Pristine Paradise’ paraphrases this constellation between Malta and Gozo, maybe even referring to ‘the island’ as an utopian place itself, as described in Thomas More’s book ‘Utopia’ from 1551, which imagines a complex, self- contained community set on an island, in which people share a common culture and way of life.

 

 

Nadine Baldow often experiments on her own personal relationship to nature like she did during her residency on Gozo. She took part in several adventurous, nature-near artist-in-residencies such as in the Himalayas in India, the national park Šumava in Czech and the nature conservation island Vilm in Germany. With her ‘expeditions’ the artist, having mainly lived in the city, seeks to find out why our relationship with nature may be a hard to break toxic fabric of lateral relations and chains of activity that administrates scales, times, bodies and materials. Her own ‘wrong’ perception inspires her to introduce a different advocacy for herself and her artistic practice related to ecology.

 

 

Another theorist, who extensively researches on the phenomenon of the Anthropocene, the manmade epoch, is Timothy Morton, a pioneering thinker in the field of “ecology without nature”. In his conception of the ‘Dark Ecology’ or the world of ‘Zero Landscapes’ he names one essential problem, which lies in our wrong perception of nature as simply a form of landscape. Traditional modes of landscape representation especially in the West, associated e.g. with German Romanticism, rather manifest a pictorial and aesthetic imperative of landscape than one addressing topics from the widespread exploitation of land and resources to climate change. Morton insists we have to let go of the idea of landscape as a picture in a frame, even if the picture is liquid and motile, like a movie. The problem he sees is the notion of the frame, and the distance the viewer has to assume for the landscape to appear as such. Because of this distance, the landscape embodies a subjective (whatever word works best here, spiritual, ideological or whatever) state. The picture is about the attitude you must assume to look at the picture. It’s less about land, then, and more about scape. Those framings of land, which turned land it into scapes and consequently into landscape open a vital space for imagination in Nadine Baldow’s work, that brought human kind into an explosive spatial battlefield. It is economists, who say, land is the most profitable value on this planet. Those who own the land are those who are in power. In her future it is the nature that is in power. With or without us.

 

 

Instead of concluding let me end with the poem of the Mexican author Octavio Paz, placed already at the beginning of my essay, originally published on the very first page of Henri Lefebvre’s famous book „The Production of Space“. The core of Lefebre's humanism is his critique of the alienating conditions of everyday life, which he developed as a critique of the alienation and false consciousness by consumer culture. Space for Lefebvre is a politically contested field. Space is everything, it determines who we are as humans. And yet, he tells us, we handed over control to a world of endless productions. This dilemma of the alienation, which Nadine Baldow suggest us to pay attention to with her exhibition at Valletta Contemporary, could be strikingly summarized with the poem ‘Envoi’.

 

 

Imprisoned by four walls

(To the north, the crystal of non-knowledge

a landscape to be invented

to the south, reflective memory

to the east, the mirror

to the west, stone and the song of silence)

I wrote messages, but received no reply 

 

 

1 Jason W. Moore, “Putting Nature to Work: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Challenge of World- Ecology,” in Cecilia Wee, Janneke Schonenbach, and Olaf Arndt, eds., Supramarkt. (Irene Books, 2015)

2 Anna Tsing, Blasted Landscapes (and the Gentle Art of Mushroom Picking) https:// www.multispecies-salon.org/tsing/

3 Timothy Mitchell', Carbon Democracy, p. 29, Verso Books, 2011.