Abstract
Meteolore: Air Stones, Ground Holes
The artistic practice-based PhD-project Meteolore: Air Stones, Ground Holes will focus on stones of cosmic origin and their imprint onto landscapes and human perception. The starting point of this project is a found postcard, sent to the recipient in 1914, depicting a black and white image of Kaali lake in Saaremaa island - a landing site of a meteorite and a birthplace of my grandfather. The second starting point is an artistic obsession to trace the shared mineral kinship through the iron present in both the meteorite and our blood. Within this PhD project I will catalogue moments where meteorites have participated in human lives - cosmologically, biologically, politically, socially, speculatively -, and develop audio-visual installations, text pieces, performative actions, and a toolbox of artistic field work methods within the research process.
Building on my previous work addressing geologic bodies and time scales, the ambition of this PhD project is to open and carve out a space for storytelling that attempts to go beyond human. Ecological discourse and communication with the more-than-human have been close to my heart and artistic practice, and meaningfully contributing to these fields will be one of the main reasons to go forward with the PhD studies.
In my artistic practice I have been inspired by environmental poetry and more-than-human theories/practices, as well as by artists working with ecology, transforming matter and challenging anthropocentric thinking. During the PhD project I wish to dive deeper into these topics, and to have a closer look at oral histories, storytelling practices, speculative writing, folklore studies. I also plan to invest time to learn new skills and form long-term collaborations to bring my material experimentation to a higher level.
I have chosen three meteorite sites in Estonia which will serve as three case studies, each of which I approach through different perspectives and practices. Kaali meteorite crater study will include archival research with the intention to assemble my own catalogue, a multilayered resource for the whole PhD project. I will collect various elements related to the three-fold topic (meteorite, crater, lore/science) which will stimulate further research methodology and creation of artistic works/actions. I will approach the second case study - Kärdla crater directly and in-situ by investigating the landscape through mapping and connecting with the human and plant/mineral communities of the area. The third case study is an underwater Neugrund crater which is a site of intense international interest by scientific communities. Through observing and talking to the scientists I aim to find connections and controversies between the ancient mythological and the contemporary scientific knowledges. I believe that my artistic intervention - writing a speculative text - will create wider curiosity about how meteorite and human bodies are connected to each other.
My goal is to transform the human-centredness and include the more-than-human in our human stories. Meteolore: Air Stones, Ground Holes will look at the meteorite as someone and something that allows us to experience our entanglement with diverse timescales through the mineral composition of our bodies - connecting human and meteoric.