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Abstract of my essay "The Baltic Waterways: Mapping Cross-Cultural and Ecological Awareness of the Baltic Sea."
 
Artists from various countries bordering the Baltic Sea, express their frustrations with environmental crises, often through culturally specific lenses or politically motivated commentaries. This anthropogenic sea is bordered by so many diverse countries that the most pressing issue for the future of the Baltic seascape and its coastal reach include differing socio-political policies, which result in incompatible ways of navigating and treating its ecosystem. Warming oceans and melting permafrost from Canada and Russia, plastic pollution from the coast, and sound pollution from ships and barges are the main factors affecting this specific cold-water ecosystem. Contemporary musicians, academics and artists from Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Sami and various Scandinavian communities have turned into climate activists to highlight the global crisis of the Anthropocene, and the grave local impacts. The 2016 show Mare Balticum at the Kumu Art Museum in Estonia created a solidarity of marine-space from coast to coast, filling the museum with sounds recorded from various points in the Baltic that were recorded while scientists were simultaneously studying the effects of human-induced sound on the sea’s ecosystem. In 2019, Sami activist, artist and musician Sofia Jannok participated in the Baltic Sea Festival and applied her Indigenous methodologies and musical activism as protest tools against the degradation of the Baltic Sea. The proposed manuscript takes my current dissertation Finnish artist Antti Laitinen plays with the complex local relationships residents have with the Baltic Sea in relation to its use and abuse, by creating an island made of sandbags (It’s My Island (2007)) or sailing across it in a make-shift raft from scavenged forest-floor wood (Bark Boat (2010)). Swedish artist collective SIMKA also plays with natural materiality in Baltic Sea – Floating Trunks (2014), choreographing the relationship between water, wind, land and human interventions and how each factor impacts one another. Polish artist Marta Krzeslak’s site-specific installation works make reference to the forces of nature in dialogue with human activity, while the 2019 show Human-Free Earth, part of the project Plasticity of the Planet at U-jazdowski Gallery in Warsaw, forces audiences to face the reality of the anthropogenic impact of plastic waste in the Baltic.