Iida Jonsson and Ssi Saarinen are a Berlin-based artist duo from the Åland Islands in the Finnish Archipelago. Their research-based practice is dedicated to developing an expanded understanding of the non-binary. They pursue this through multi-layered investigations into perceived dualisms, questioning received narratives around the natural and the built environment, institutional and geological history, and national and individual identity. Projects often span multiple years and evolve across a variety of media, with an emphasis on the perspective of the camera operator. Formally trained as cinematographers, Jonsson and Saarinen use film, photography, and the embodied movement of the camera - often shooting hand-held, without stabilizing devices, creating a choreography of and for the lens. They combine their cinematographic assays with archival materials, found objects and artifacts, original field research, and collaborations with sound artists and performers to translate these ongoing studies into formats for public display, with an emphasis on site-specific installations.
As such, their work operates within, outside, and between the walls of the “institution,” broadly defined — revealing the contours of the museum, the university, the archive, the state, and the edifice that is the art world in order to permeate them, opening new doors to interpretation and experience of the histories, ideas, and narrative environments that surround and structure life.
Suzanne, Terrarium, Greywater, Fuck U, Live at Volksbühne, and Silt were made with artist Ona Julija Lukas Steponaitytė. Vers Le Blanc was made with musician Hannes Ferm. Data Free Zone was made with researcher Victoria Harnesk.
Silt, LED panels and 16-channel sound with two subwoofers, Reethaus, Berlin Art Week featured, Berlin DE, 2024
Context The landscape of Lithuania features many wetlands. Under the Soviet occupation, a web of drainage systems was installed to dry out these marshes and create fields for agricultural use. After the fall of the regime, these systems were no longer maintained and fell into disrepair. Today, water accumulates in backyards, roadsides, parking lots, and fields, flooding built infrastructure to form “lakes” of ever-changing depth and size. Most of them are unnamed and not visible on maps, their occurrence notably swift relative to the scale of geological time. Because bodies of water can rarely be legally privately owned, landowners risk losing their properties to bureaucracy if they report these aquatic formations to local authorities. The lakes thus emerge in silence, their contents, depth, and form evolving daily with the seasons and the rhythm of natural shedding and decay. The surrounding landscapes are static by comparison, shaped by deliberate infrastructural, bureaucratic, and ideological endeavors. The messy complexity and changeability of the lake provide counterpoints to the fixed built landscape, as both a symbolic resistance to and unintentional product of political imposition on the inhabited landscape.
“If you name a cloud, it becomes a lake” is an old Lithuanian proverb. These lakes are unnamed, informing local life from off the grid. Silt explores what it might mean to put these formations under the lens — not to formally chart them, but to consider their function within a geological and cultural landscape.
This body of work takes a lake that formed suddenly in 2012 and evolved over several years outside of the Lithuanian village of Likančiai as a starting point to explore the swampy territory between the built and the natural environment, between erosion and flourishing, and between state institutions and the organic forces that operate independently of intervention.
Silt, LED panels and 16-channel sound with two subwoofers, Reethaus, Berlin Art Week featured, Berlin DE, 2024
Silt (2024) 30’43”
Silt is a site-specific audiovisual installation created for a solo exhibition at Reethaus in Berlin that explores these marshy landscapes from a forensic documentary perspective reminiscent of breaking news coverage of climate emergencies. First-person POV photography, investigative diving, and helicopter footage are overlaid with a soundtrack by composer Alexander Iezzi that, like the Lithuanian landscape, never settles into any particular rhythm or harmony.
Silt, LED panels and 16-channel sound with two subwoofers, Reethaus, Berlin Art Week featured, Berlin DE, 2024
November (2024) Sixteen discarded solar panels collected from flooded fields are installed in two grids. The panels are covered in a thin layer of dried-out silt, a material primarily present when water is suddenly stirred up through rapid water elevation such as flooding. Just as the exposure of film can preserve a moment in space and time, these panels expose a unique temporality, echoing the genesis of a new lake in Likančiai. The solar panels are accompanied by an ensemble of five speakers conceived in collaboration with Alexander Iezzi and mastering engineer Enyang Urbik.
The aural component - a musical ode to a nameless lake - references the historical imprint of landscape on music, considering how compositions have sought to translate nature into sound. The polyphonic, dissonant arrangement deliberately conjures out-of-tune chords alongside folk melodies, strings, and metallic groans that interpret the changing depths and ecologies of the waters.
November, solar panels and five-channel Fohhn speakers, inter.pblc, Copenhagen DK, 2024.
November, solar panels and five-channel Fohhn speakers, inter.pblc, Copenhagen DK, 2024.
June, finger drawings on solar panel and pollen, Amsterdam Kunstverein, Amsterdam NL, 2022.
November II (2024)
In a sculptural installation expanding on Silt’s research, solar panels are positioned in a grid at the edge of a pond at the Deep Forest Sculpture Park in Kibaek, Denmark. These recovered artifacts are partly submerged and partly exposed, as though “shipwrecked” or blown down by a catastrophic storm. The outdoor presentation puts the viewer in the position of witness or cast member in a reenactment of a dramatic event, as though on a film set. The landscape is thus activated, not simply as an image but an environment that can be stepped into, a place for the first-hand experience of the built infrastructures of power that are entangled with the natural world. The discarded solar panels function as mirrors to this landscape, reflecting its origins - as one might encounter one’s image in a reflection on a lake - and exposing its volatile existence, putting this ephemeral body of water on the proverbial “grid.”