Maria Ångerman
Red Herring Fieldnotes
Dormant relationships
–About earbones, lichen and the body as sensor
After leaving the island of Seili in the Archipelago Sea behind, what lingered in my mind were not the stories of the leper colony founded in the 17th century, nor the hierarchical power structures of the women’s mental hospital established there later. It was the otoliths of the herring. These calcified ear bones detect gravity, motion, and orientation. They are geological diaries housed within a biological body — literal sensors of balance and movement, allowing the herring to navigate their fluid, shifting world. Much like trees, otoliths grow in rings. Each layer records environmental information: temperature, salinity, even stress. To access this data, parts of the otoliths are extracted and analysed by a complex machine.
I volunteered to dig out the otoliths, pleased to engage in an embodied task — to get a sense of the meticulous work the scientists carry out. However, I examined only one herring. They examine at least fifteen herrings per day, a hundred per week, a thousand over a summer. After ten years, they have gathered enough data to begin to understand the impacts of environmental changes on the herring. How do those repeated gestures become imprinted in a researcher’s body? What silent knowledge is stored there — without ever being turned into data? What happens to that knowledge?
It was my first time visiting Seili. Over the few days we spent there, we crossed the same patch of lawn many times between our lodging and the cooking facilities. After a long stay abroad, with few nearby natural areas to visit, I was content to finally have the opportunity to enjoy time in nature. My gaze began searching for different shades of green, for the first edible, nutritious plants that spring so generously offers. I spotted quite a few and was particularly happy to encounter hairy bittercress, a small, bushy plant from the brassica family. It was a new acquaintance — supposedly common in moist areas all over Europe — though it doesn’t seem to grow in our archipelago further north. However, this one wasn’t as crisp and tasty as the one I’d recently found on a rooftop in Amsterdam. Had it already hardened itself to withstand the footsteps of the tourists soon to arrive?
While still chewing, my gaze landed on a pale greenish lichen, a perfectly rounded tuft — actually quite similar to the hairy bittercress — that had grown atop a tiny twig, probably broken off in a storm. I picked it up to observe it more closely. It had a structure reminiscent of a dahlia: bushy with long, flattened, strap-like petals hanging down, speckled with black spots. Before I knew it, it had slipped into my pocket, as if my hands had a life of their own.
According to the British Lichen Society, a lichen is a stable symbiotic association between a fungus and algae and/or cyanobacteria. The relationship is thought to be mutualistic, since both the fungus and its photosynthetic partners, called photobionts, benefit. Thus, rather than being a species, a lichen is a relationship between species. These relationships cover eight percent of the planet’s surface — an area larger than that covered by rainforests. They live on rocks, trees, fences, and the surfaces of deserts. There are even untethered lichens that blow around without living on anything in particular. The Ramalina lichen that had been resting on the lawn had lived on a twig. However, was it perhaps an organism longing to join its untethered kin — to embark on a new adventure?
Like most living organisms, lichen needs light and water to grow; however, this symbiotic organism does so at a rate of only a fraction of a millimeter to a few millimeters per year, depending on the partnership. During periods of drought, it can preserve itself until the next rainfall, when it becomes soft and lush again. In its dormant state, however, it is surprisingly brittle. What happens in that dormant stage? How long can it persist?
The so-called dead zones of the Baltic Sea, alarmingly growing in size — could they, in some sense, also be seen as dormant? Scientists have found resting zooplankton eggs in the oxygen-free seabeds that can stay buried for up to fifteen years, waiting for oxygen levels to improve. If eggs can preserve that long, then what might symbiotic organisms like lichen be capable of? Is this part of the reason some lichens live for hundreds of years — and some even thousands?
Lichens have been sent into space, exposed to cosmic rays, and examined for the limits and limitations of terrestrial life. Even scientists who specialise in fungal networks still call lichens living riddles. The closer scientists get to them, the stranger they seem. They challenge our concept of identity and force us to question where one organism ends and another begins.
Both the sensing body and the lichen exist through their capacity to be in relation. They are both shaped by slowness, patience, and responsiveness to shifts around them. To think of the body as a sensor is to acknowledge that sensing is never solitary. Like lichen, we feel and know through others.
For some time now, the Ramalina lichen has been resting on my windowsill. As I tend to do with samples for observation, I had planned to bring it back south next time, considering it a sort of loan. Perhaps the lichen perceives it as a strange trip north. Would it sense direction in space? What are its “otoliths” — those structures that record gravity and movement?
The images are chemigrams, a camera-less method, where, in this case, lichen and seaweed are directly embedded into the emulsion of a 16mm film.
About the artist:
Maria Ångerman is an artist and filmmaker, currently based in Vaasa, Finland. She is known for her immersive moving image work that examines the complex relationship between the human and the natural world. Her practice adresses loss, transformation, adaptability and survival and navigates a delicate territory between documentary fact and poetic fiction. mariaangerman.com
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