The first person who called me "mother" was my mother, and I was about to throw up. Later, when I confessed my instinctive denial and embarrassment towards the word (a role) I felt pushed upon me, Mara said, "Now, now, look at what has been done to us..." and I could physically sense my lack of words. I had gotten stuck, unable to find possible ways to deal with the situation. I didn’t want to run away, I didn’t want to flee. I just wanted my experience, drenched in severe brain fog, for myself—time and space. When it comes to relating and allowing for intra-action, no predetermined practice can do it; it asks for your total presence in the now.
I developed a wish to understand what had and was still happening to me, to my own body. A body in rapid yet slow change. A process happening within its own agency. An acceleration of inverted weathering beyond control. A body in creation. Building brain, sharing space, exchanging cells, hammering hearts and moisty muscles in its own, although somehow predetermined, tempo and rhythm.
You know it’s happening, yet it’s not in your hands to control; to act becomes fuzzy, dizzy. You know something has started, and at a certain point, it will come out—dead or alive. When is the beginning, and when does it end? Where do you begin, and where do I end? Are we just another cell split, another step of copper moving around Big Bang?
Kilpisjärvi.
I hear it’s a rough place here—hard weather, hard wind, they tell me. But it’s certainly not rough in the social way that my own neighborhood at home is; no one gets shot outside the house here. Some places have a wind that seems restless, but I don’t feel it here. This place rather keeps some loving fire in its ground, although slowly developed. I hear the stories. One love started with a cup of tea and two different experiences of space (and borders); the other one on Mount Saana (I heard), or was it actually in the station's sauna?
You know it’s happening, yet it’s not in your own hands to control; to act becomes fuzzy, dizzy. You know something has started, and at a certain point, it will come out—dead or alive. Slowly, we comprehend what is happening.
Perhaps, an often repeated phrase is that human physical experience of climate change lies in a remembrance of temperatures: the humidity of air, the amount of rain and snow, the confusion of instability. Not recognizing the current air against your skin. Weather nostalgia. Yet climate as such might never have been stable and the increasing acceleration is not limited to a site-specific place. Although the change in this area is supposedly fast, it feels so slow to my human senses. The long-term data rather becomes about imagination. A research plot that is not behaving as it should. Releasing carbon in the sun, not allowed. Tree lines moving up the hills. However, due to historical (now contemporary) decisions regarding reindeer pastures and borders, Saana's hills are not as threatened as in many other places, e.g., in Sweden. Complex as it is, and not sufficiently contextualized, the social climate affects the global climate on different scales.(1)
A fear of (not) knowing, a speculation of what it could be, uncertain behavior. Slowly, we accept what is happening?
We notice that something has changed; processes we didn't have in mind have already started. Mercury usually travels with the clouds; Chinese industry sprinkles our faces in the rain, and fish absorb it. Now it’s spreading from below our feet—from the thawing permafrost, traveling large areas with the wind.(2) The ground's porous skin is opening. The plants suck it up. The animals eat them. Soon we may mine mercury from our own bodies.
Google: Which body part is most affected by mercury?
In general, mercury tends to affect the nervous system. This means that unborn babies and children are at greater risk because their nervous systems are developing.
Kilpisjärvi.
When I arrived, I first fell into the smell. It’s a smell I recognize and hold very dear. Muscles relax. Probably, it’s the smell of soil rich in lime or rather hydrocarbons from the ground vegetation, the byproduct of photosynthesis—air filled with leftovers. The landscape of lower fells is familiar; the 30 degrees when I arrive is not. The lush life of high chaparral I spotted from the bus inhabits a confusing flavor.
I appreciate the lack of industry that I usually connect to this landscape—the foggy narrative of minerals and mining that I intuitively associate with it. Kiruna, the hometown of my grandmother, the tourist train's panorama route along the blasted mountain, the echo of iron transports every hour over the fells. Iore/Aorta. An acceleration of weathering beyond control. I know it’s certainly not the only narrative, but it dominates my mind. The greed and speed, the need to lead. While I am still in Kilpisjärvi, another worker is reported mysteriously dead at Northvolt. Lithium running. It speeds processes up. Whose skin will get licked by the fire?(3) At home, my father takes his first DNA-test to see if he, and so possibly me, is a carrier of the gene that is related to ‘Skelleftesjukan’(4), a disease most commonly found in people with heritage in the northern parts of Sweden. A genetic mutation producing proteins that slowly grows into brain, heart and liver and causes severe sickness if not treated in time. Here, the clouds travel with the wind over the ground, you can see the layer they create above the earth's crust. Like a fascia, in constant movement. When a fascia is healthy, it glides smoothly over organs, muscles, and bones. When a body has the possibility to slow down, to stay, and to slowly relate to itself, to other bodies, and to its surroundings, it tends to create space and time for internal knowledge—on how to understand complexities backward and forward simultaneously and a capacity not to act on fear. All of this must be seen as ground points in relation to how to stay with the climate, the social climate and what arguments will be seen as “rational” in relation to industry and social industrial heritage.
The brain constantly creates models of reality—of hope and fear, of what could possibly be possible. The brain remains plastic until the moment we die.
Regarding the ongoing processes of “climate change” and so-called “green transition”, in general but in a swedish setting specifically in the north. The second wave of industrialization happens in an area with an already contaminated past in regards of colonial lines, industry and extractivism. How can we change the direction of the ongoing debate and it’s lack of alternative perspectives? To break with neoliberal “rational” ideas of “being a savior” and the re-use of historical arguments of industry bringing hope, creating welfare and work. And, in a northern swedish context; how come hope, welfare and work is still only on offer when it comes to establishing industry? Where is the continuous dedication and ambition, outside the area itself, to regain a decent welfare system and continuous possibilities?
Who benefits from the desire for change, for new hope and technical innovation?
“An ethic of fixing, making-up- for, and even sustaining cannot recognize that all actions are forever contracted in lines-of-flight whose effects will continue to be made and unmade in many futures to come. Climate time, when assumed to be something we are “in,” or as part of a neo-liberal progress narrative that we will either push forward or stave off, thus disables ways of thinking and doing ecology that stretch around and through our imbrications with climate. (…)
Possibilities do not, in Barad’s terms, “represent a fixed event horizon” or a “homogeneous, fixed, uniform container of choices” (246). And, although we need to think climate time in different ways, this rethinking itself opens to a political space of engagement. As Grosz writes, “concepts”—like the notion of weathering we propose—“do not solve problems that events generate for us,” but “they enable us to surround ourselves with possibilities for being otherwise.” They are “modes of address, modes of connection: they are ‘movable bridges’ between those forces that relentlessly impinge on us from the outside to form a problem and those that we can muster within ourselves to address such problems” (Grosz 2012, 14). The reimagination of ourselves as weather bodies, with their insistence on recognizing the “connectivity of phenomena at different scales” (Barad 2007, 246), is already a politics. Such a politics pushes us beyond practices of “pointing out similarities [or differences] between one place or event and another” (this hot spell is the same temperature as one in 1935, therefore we have nothing to worry about) to understanding “how those places or events are made through one another” (246). A climate change imaginary of “thick time” pushes us to hold together the phenomena of a weather pattern, a heat-absorbent ocean, the pleasure of a late-fall swim, and the turn of a key in the ignition as the interconnected temporalities we call “climate change.”(5)
Kilpisjärvi
When I left, I felt like a sun exploding—thousand little pieces in slow motion, trying to reflect each little piece.
I am happy that sometimes one can feel this way.
Lately I read this sentence somewhere but I don't remember where, it is somehow suitable. Things don’t fall apart because they are laboriously kept together. The opposite of emotional mining.
Kilpisjärvi and its inhabitants left me reflecting on what it means to be grounded in a place. It made me utterly aware of distances and closeness, when and where a border is possibly passed and how to place yourself in relation to something or someone else.
My warmest thank you to everyone I met at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station and specially to Gangotri, Maija, Marija, Hannu, Leena and Oula. Keep the fire alive!
Thanks to Ilya Wikström and Kim Ekberg for assistance in production. Thanks to Amalia Kasakove for reading and introducing me to some texts that has become very dear to me over the years. And thank you to Bio Art Society for all the work making it possible and for insisting on these encounters.