FRAUD
25.-27.9.2024
Seili & Pargas
The artist pack FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) returned to Seili to continue their collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute and to plan for the next witnessing seminar on the island with CAA. During their residency as invited artists at Saari Residence (Kone Foundation), FRAUD focused on their ongoing enquiry into the unsustainable circulations of phosphate in the Baltic Sea area. As part of this research FRAUD, Saari and CAA co-organised a field trip to the limestone quarry in Pargas, Turku Archipelago. Professor Ilppo Vuorinen (Archipelago Research Institute) guided the group during the visit and led the discussion on the eutrophication of the Archipelago Sea.
In dialogue with CAA and the Archipelago Research Institute they also returned to questions concerning the significance of fieldwork practices in long-term study of environmental changes: what might be the invaluable aspects of fieldwork that will become incalculable losses when methods change and the scientist no longer spends time on site due to the increased automation of data collection? Like in the financialization of forests and carbon, in automation and modelling, the relationship between knowledge and place gets severed. This is what FRAUD hopes to further direct their attention to in the future:
As a result of our visits to the phosphate and lime mines during the Saari residency, alongside our ongoing work with CAA with/in Seili, we are thinking about the importance of the embodied nature of knowledge production. Thinking with place but also knowing through place. Over the years, we have become fascinated with basic science and the longstanding time series of data it has produced. In the current context of hype around AI automation, it is important to remember the key role of the body in data sensing and analysis. In discussion with the scientists working in Seili, it becomes clear that it is their longstanding engagement with the island that affords their ability to analyze the different data streams. The data makes sense to them because they have been walking these shores repetitively over the years, noticing, observing, smelling, feeling and digesting the changes. It is this epistemic continuum between the anecdotical and the evidentiary that we are extremely attracted to. It is, after all, such an embodied practice logged in the notebooks which enabled the researchers at the institute to understand the relationship between rainfall and eutrophication in the Baltic, a major finding. The act of noticing and paying close attention is also crucial to art practices such as Investigative Aesthetics. This will hopefully be the subject of the next witnessing seminar: how we might exchange between different practitioners on how data annotation is practiced and taught, and how embodied knowledge operates across scientific methods and investigative aesthetics.
Read more about FRAUD’s ongoing work and their research during the residency at Saari in the autumn 2024, including their field trips to the Siilinjärvi phosphate mine and the Pargas limestone quarry, in this interview with Taru Elfving (CAA): Can we think with a place without it having imprinted us?
More information on the first witness seminar in Seili (2022) convened by FRAUD as part of their site-specific work Fields of May.