Visual artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö has for several years worked with themes around our relationship to nature. When she set out to find destroyed natural areas for the video performance work for those yet to be (2016–18), she was shocked by how many there were to choose from.

– Can you talk about the background of for those yet to be? How did you get the idea for the work?

– It started when I read an article about the Gold King Mine disaster in Colorado in 2015. Enormous amounts of wastewater, which contained toxic heavy metals, were accidentally released into the Animas river, which was stained bright yellow-orange by the oxidised iron. It looked spectacular and beautiful in pictures, but was a terrible environmental disaster that poisoned both nature and agricultural areas on a large scale. At the same time, I heard that the Baltic Sea – which in a way is my ‘home sea’ with which I grew up in Finland – is one of the world's most polluted sea areas. I didn’t know that before.

I was already working on a project with short texts that I wrote on cardboard signs of the type used in demonstrations. I got the idea that I wanted to make a kind of one-person demonstration where I would travel with the signs to different parts of the world and hold them up in front of places where nature has been destroyed as a result of human intervention.

– You’ve filmed in as many as 27 places around the world. How did you go about choosing these areas?

–  Some were obvious, and I knew early on that I wanted to include them in the work, such as the Amazon jungle in South America and Chernobyl in Ukraine. Other, lesser-known places – such as the Viiankiaapa swamp area in Finland – I found while making the work, which took three years.

I was interested in places that were destroyed or were about to become so by pollution and human intervention, but where the destruction isn’t necessarily visible. I didn’t primarily look for huge rubbish heaps and the like, but rather, beautiful natural areas.

– You must have spent a lot of time preparing?

– Yes, and unfortunately it’s not difficult to find information about natural areas that have been destroyed by humans. As soon as you start reading about ecological disasters, you realise that they’re everywhere.

An example is when I was in Australia while working on another project. I already knew that I was going to film at the Great Barrier Reef, where the corals have been bleached due to higher water temperatures. But in addition, I came across many other places that could just as easily have been part of the work. Among other things, Australia has some of the world's largest cattle ranches. I heard that the area of ​​only one of the ranches is the same size as the Netherlands. It's completely crazy. I could have made ten videos in Australia alone.

–  How has it affected you to go so deep into the topic of destroyed nature? It sounds depressing.

–  It was absolutely exhausting and depressing. At the same time, because the destruction is invisible in many places, one got this strange feeling of illusion, that nothing is really wrong. In Australia, you can’t see that the coral reefs are destroyed unless you  dive into the sea. And in Chernobyl, the radioactive pollution is invisible. The forest looks like an ordinary forest, and nature is lush with a rich wildlife. Although it’s an illusion – some scientists believe it will take 48,000 years before the radiation is gone – one got the feeling that nature had somehow overcome the disaster, and there is hope in that. Other places, like the Great Barrier Reef, are so damaged that they’ll never heal.

It's now been a few years since I made this work, and I think it's interesting that it actually looks as if there’s been a little more political awareness in recent years about the importance of conserving nature. But it's still going way too slow.

– Did any of the places you visited make more of an impression than others?

– The oil sands plant in Athabasca in Canada had a very threatening atmosphere. The area is huge and flat, and in the distance we saw a tall pipe that fired flame explosions, very high up in front of the beautiful sunset. It’s reminiscent of Mordor in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It was legal to drive around and film there, but we were followed by guards, and every time we stopped to film, they tried to prevent us even though we were doing nothing wrong. It felt gloomy and frightening.

–  You’ve made works that deal with people's relationship to nature before. In the video performance Take Me Anywhere from 2016, you blindfolded yourself and let the horse you rode go wherever it wanted in a desert landscape. And in Something Warm When I Think About You from 2013, you embraced and almost seemed to want to merge with trees and rocks.

–  Yes, I’ve long been interested in the way people relate to and communicate with each other, and our relationship to animals and nature. I’m interested in how in Western culture one sees man as separate from nature and elevated above all other species, while other cultures have a more holistic view of it. I’ve done several works with both horses and dogs that are about how different species can exist together and mean something to each other.

–  for those yet to be was shown in a large exhibition at the Emma Museum in Espo outside Helsinki earlier in 2020. What do you think about the work now being presented at train stations along the Østfold line in Norway?

–  I like to show my work in different settings. A work can be displayed in more ways than one. This specific work is well suited to being shown in waiting halls at train stations, since it relates to traveling slowly as one does on trains. I like to travel by train myself. I prefer it to flying and choose it if I can, although it sometimes takes forever compared to a flight. I also think it's nice to show the work to people who might not want to seek out art in a gallery or museum, but who just comes across it a bit randomly when they’re going to take the train.

–  What can art contribute to the fight against climate change and nature destruction?

–  This is something I thought about a lot while I was making for those yet to be. Artists have the opportunity to work across disciplines, and to ask more open questions. Unlike activism, which in a way is a tool used when a situation has become acute, art can be more timeless. And unlike science, which often presents the devastation through numbers and facts that can seem scary and yet from which it can be easy to distance oneself, as an artist you have the opportunity to work more directly with a wider range of emotions. Art can create an emotional connection to the world around us. For me, it’s a very important aspect of my profession.

Silje Rønneberg Hogstad