date
Notes from ARCUS, Japan
Knots of the Moirai
Landscape as a storytelling tool
Materiality → Memory → Myth
Knots of the Moirai
Landscape as a storytelling tool
Materiality → Memory → Myth
< work in progress >
23/O7/2O26
31/11/2O25
2O/11/2O24
2O/11/2O24
31/11/2O25
2O/11/2O24
2O/11/2O24
Notes from ARCUS, Japan
We meet on the street and as we shake hands, he looks up with suspicion – “where is that going?” There is a plane heading East. He is quick to check the flight radar, it’s a Chinese flight heading over Belarus to it’s destination. Political alliances imply shorter flight times.
The borderland between East and West Europe finds ways to remind us of itself. I become aware of the sky, I look at it in search for answers, drawing conclusions with a lack of knowledge, projecting fears and clichés. Observation implies the observer and the observed. I feel like both.
In an attempt to step away from my own heavily charged observations of the sky, I find myself in ARCUS Projects, in a research artist-in-residency program in Moriya, Ibaraki.
The skies in Japan are a beautiful pale grey in the late weeks of June. The color is rather flat and reminds me of a light-box display. The sun raises and sets suspiciously early. The grayness fluctuates, but persists throughout the day, as the skies of Tokyo look bright even during the night.
This grayness draws me, I find it particularly beautiful in the context of the city with its own shades of grey in buildings, pavements, transportation. Grey is good, grey means no sun, grey means relatively low temperatures. I am not familiar with this relationship to grey, but I happily accept it.
When it rains, it also feels flat, like a light shower or the type of mist they have for fruits and vegetables in supermarkets. The lack of noise, a constant low hum adds to the grey. All is grey, and the consensus is that we like it that way.
Observation implies the observer and the observed. I feel like both. I take the role of the observer as I collect spaces and events in relation to the observations of the sky – traditional, scientific, and political. Mostly I am a lone observer. In other moments, I find myself in company of other observers, as we participate in communal rituals. I am acutely aware of being the observed as well. Holding a camera, pausing to film, writing in public, being a foreigner – all these make me the recipient of the gaze. At times, it also feels like I am the observed of the sky itself.
Tanabata celebrates two stars, the weaver Orihime, daughter of the universe, and cowherd Hikoboshi, who are only allowed to meet once a year on the seventh night of the seventh month in the Milky Way.
I am guided to the Tokyo Daijingu Shrine for a prayer offering on the occasion of the Tanabata. A paper marking is placed around my neck, I get seated in the front row, and watch as two priests and two young women carry out the prayer ceremony. At a certain moment, the priests read out the names of the people gathered today – I listen carefully to hear my own name, pronounced with a short pause followed by surprising accuracy. I am cleansed with bells and given a branch to make a wish. I follow and mimic the actions of the others closely, attempting unsuccessfully to blend in.
A short train ride, a longer bus ride and a quick cable car away, I find the two peaks of Mt Tsukuba decorated with Tanabata wishes, written on colorful pieces of paper, which stand out a bit invasively against the grey skies. The two peaks represent two lovers – similarly like Orihime and Hikoboshi – only these are ancestral deities, said to have conjured the whole of Japan out of the sea. Their love has a tragic ending, reminding me of Orpheus and Eurydice.
With the grey skies, I can see one peak standing on the other, but not much more. I do not see the stars or Tokyo, both I know are laying somewhere in the distance. There are no answers in the grey sky, the naked eye cannot find a place to rest. Perhaps with tools, sensors, telescopes the grayness has meaning.
I visit the Chiba Shrine, where belief systems are layered on top of each other, as a temple becomes a shrine, and as Myōken, a Buddhist deity of the North Star, is replaced with Ame-no-Minakanushi, a Shinto deity, who came into existence when the universe was formed. During the Meiji period, many Buddhist temples became Shinto shrines, but political motives to do alter the human instinct to look up in a search for answers.
It is mid-July when I start looking for other methods of sense-making, transitioning from mythology, religion, storytelling into science and technology. In the meanwhile, the dim cloudy grey skies are replaced by scorching, blinding grey skies – even with the sun, there is no blue.
I find myself once again in Tsukuba, visiting the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Science Museum of Map and Survey. Here, observation is externalized, sent upwards and projected downwards through satellites, telescopes, sensors… The museums allow visitors to play pretend as the observer – people walk over a giant curved map of the Japanese peninsula, take pictures in the costume of an astronaut, and climb up stairs to peak inside a model space ship.
Mt Tsukuba makes another appearance. I trace my hike over a topographical model, laying here right next to Mt Fuji. It is this angle that I felt observed from.
Not too far away from JAXA and the Museum of Map and Survey (I love that those are singular), a rather large and particularly beautiful white balloon is released twice a day in Tsukuba Aerological Observatory and 1,300 other places in the world. Each balloon carries a radiosonde, which collects data for routine aerological observations and, in this way, take a snapshot of the conditions of the entire globe.
Other equipment, most facing the sky, are placed outside or even on the top of the building, exposed to the elements they are sensing. The processing of the collected data happens in a well ventilated office, on a myriad of screens, each showing a different and constantly changing diagram. What quickly becomes clear is that even with thorough explanation, I understand very little about the way that we are making sense of the sky. What does it mean that ozone has to become electricity before we find out how much of it there is in the stratosphere? Infrared lights, transmitters and receivers, levers, lasers, sensors, meters and containers – embodied information is synthesized into familiar formats such as celsius, visibility indexes, and rain probability.
The sky looks notably plain today. I check the weather app to see at what time it is best to cycle to the train station and think of the balloon released earlier this morning to enable my estimates. The balloon and I read the sky, each with our own sensibilities.
The train takes me to the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, which looks even further into the sky. Their visitor center displays telescopes no longer in use and photographs of other universes and comets from mid 1900s. A magnifying glass allows me to see tiny details of the Andromeda Galaxy, or the way it looked when it was captured in 1983. I cannot fully distinguish between stars and scratches on the photographic plate. The two images of comets have a small circular picture on the right bottom corner – a liminal space, perhaps an office, with a large wall clock, perhaps capturing when the image was taken?
I am surprised to find calendars on display here and quickly learn that observatories were and continue to be responsible for calculating and publishing national calendars. The ones I see here are pictorial, meant for those who cannot read. Yet another layer of translation is added to make sense of the sky.
Observation implies the observer and the observed. I feel like both. Between me and the sky I look up to there are layers of tools and metaphors, each developing and mutating with time, which allow a reading to be made. The grey of the Japanese skies seem less flat as these tools and metaphors become more familiar to me, although I do not pretend to fully understand them.
Knots of the Moirai
As a designer and researcher, I am drawn to studying my own history and heritage. Partially because I am proud of it, but also because I am trying to understand the lineage of the events in the middle of which I exist. Looking for formats and languages to tell different parts of history and make it relevant today is my way of untying knots.
“Lovatiesės audinys,” Klemensas Čerbulėnas, Lithuanian National Museum of Art, CC BY-NC-ND.
While Lithuania was under the russian imperial rule (1795–1914), my great-great-grandmother lost her lands to russian settlers, who were relocated to take over farms and houses and destabilize the local population. As she fled to the house of her sisters, she took what was most valuable and easiest to carry – embroidered textiles, – and buried ceramics and glassware, hoping to return to her property. The lands were never given back and the valuables never found. A few of the textiles, however, have made their way into my hands. Now over 100 years old, they look fragile and worn. Their shape is odd and their purpose unclear, but the care put into the embroidery still signifies that the towels are objects of value. The value must have been clear to my great-grandmother when she hid the textiles as family and community members were being deported to Siberia; to my grandmother when she stored them in wooden chests as the communist army attempted to take over farms yet again; and to my mother when she moved them to Vilnius during her generation’s fight for independence.
The threads that the Fates and my great-great-grandmother wove seem so fragile, but the verdict that they represent is strikingly different – a permanent life sentence for generations to come. I use the patterns of the textiles to engrave steel; they loose their fragility and become more like knots or runes, requiring untangling or deciphering. This seems more appropriate to the meaning they carry.
Landscape as a storytelling tool
The physical environment around us houses stories of who we are, where we come from and where we are headed. As a nation building tool, landscape goes beyond a terrain’s materiality and into metaphorical representations of cultural identity and history. Landscape is created through writing - folk stories, poems, historical documents, legal frameworks - and through visual forms - paintings, maps, etc. Through such mediated representations, the terrain becomes a tool to define and shape national and regional identities. This text examines the ways in which we transform raw nature into meaning through intervention and interpretation.
I define the terrain as physical formations of natural elements such as rock, soil, water, flora and fauna. The landscape, on the other hand, is a product of human values, histories, and ideologies being superimposed on the terrain and it’s tangible elements. In other words, a landscape consists of the terrain and layers of meaning.
I define the terrain as physical formations of natural elements such as rock, soil, water, flora and fauna. The landscape, on the other hand, is a product of human values, histories, and ideologies being superimposed on the terrain and it’s tangible elements. In other words, a landscape consists of the terrain and layers of meaning.
“Landscape is the result of a collective transformation of nature. It is the cultural translation of a society on a particular portion of nature, and this translation is not only material, but also spiritual, ideological and symbolic.
In this sense, landscape acts as a centre of meaning and symbolism…”
Landscape and national identity in Catalonia by Joan Nogue and Joan Vicente
In this sense, landscape acts as a centre of meaning and symbolism…”
Landscape and national identity in Catalonia by Joan Nogue and Joan Vicente
As an exercise, let’s look at the differences between a rock and the rock that makes Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan. A rock is a “mute and blind” element of the terrain. The rock that forms the Bamiyan Valley is a collection of cultural, spiritual, and ideological symbols - in other words, a landscape. Bamiyan Valley formed as a hotspot on the Silk Road, between the West with the East, telling us of commerce, migration, cultural exchange and conquest. The cultivated lands and the caves tell us of human lives and struggles; the sacred sites and Buddha monuments tells us of religion. This is not a purely historical landscape either - in 2001 the Taliban ordered the Buddha monuments to be destroyed with the aim of stopping future generations from worshipping them. Today, the 50m tall empty crevices in the rock tell us about the importance we place on controlling narratives and landscapes. However, a rock can tell stories of war, resistance, and suffering on it’s own through the traces it carries; and a rock’s stories do not always align with the stories of power.
“Humans encode physical landscapes with abstract conceptualisations of identity, experience, time, and place. Yet rather than existing as open stores of cultural data for anyone to access, landscapes are inevitably shaped by social structures that dictate who has power to oversee and control them.”
Landscape and Memory by Ben Bridges
Landscape and Memory by Ben Bridges
Landscapes are spaces of contested meaning. Through writing, visualising and altering, we communicate narratives which define the past and the future, and superimpose our perceptions and understandings of the world around us. Finnish geographer Jouni Häkli framed this as a discursive landscape – “National landscape is not only read off from nature and culture, it is also written therein.” And so, when we look at a landscape, we can ask: which stories are being told? which mediums are being used to tell it? and does the terrain tell narratives of it’s own?
Storytelling & mythology
Arguably the basis of all mediation is storytelling, which infiltrates all other kinds of mediation by serving the same purpose – uniting people with common narratives and beliefs. Storytelling can: give a terrain spiritual importance; give a terrain agency and personhood; explain natural formation and cultural identities; justify territories and nations through “natural borders.”
01 The Sleeping Giant, Ojibwe Myth (Canada): using storytelling to explain natural formations and cultural values. According to local legend, the Sleeping Giant formation is the petrified body of a spirit, who was turned to stone after the locals revealed his silver mine to European colonisers. The myth explains the rock formation, but it also tells a tale of loss and the importance of protecting Indigenous land. In the myth, the terrain is alive, it interacts with local people and can be betrayed or killed.
02 Seonghwangrim sacred forests (Korea): using storytelling to give a territory spiritual importance. Korean folk beliefs distinguish certain forests as sacred powers, protecting and guarding surrounding villages. Through narratives of human and land connection, a cultural identity and a territory is justified.
03 Natural borders: using storytelling to justify borders and territories. Rivers and mountain rages are examples of “natural borders” - terrain formations used to draw national territories. Spain and France or Peru and Argentina are some of the natural borders dividing the terrain and justifying nationalities, cultural identities, and monarchies. The narratives told about these borders are usually conflicting with the lived experience of population, where differences are less obvious or dramatic.
Maps and mappings
In the traditional form, maps are a way to highlight or hide certain narratives through graphics and text. Orally shared narratives can represent the same information, making some maps invisible and imagined. Mappings can: highlight or obscure features of a terrain; assert cultural narratives; justify territorial ownership; document change over time; create imagined geographies; and so on.
01 Carte de la Louisiane et du Course du Mississippi (1718) by Guillaume de L’Isle’s: using maps to justify territorial ownership. Guillaume de L’Isle’s map of the North America served as a strategic tool for France to legitimise its territorial claims by depicting the Mississippi River Valley with a level of geographic accuracy rare for the time, lending credibility to French control over the area. The map explicitly labels French forts and Indigenous territories aligned with France, visually reinforcing a narrative of French influence across the Mississippi Basin, minimising British and Spanish presence.
02 Ammassalik, Inuit mappings of the Arctic: using maps to assert cultural narratives. Maps highlight the culture that produces them. Strong examples of this are the Inuit mappings of the Arctic, which depict the water around the land, instead of the land itself. The experiences and priorities of the people who navigate the terrain - being able to hold and touch the map while navigating the waters during storms or in fog, - define what the map looks like. Inuit maps are also known to exist in mental and oral forms, such as songs and stories.
Naming
Another way to convey meaning is to name physical spaces by referring to emotions, events, and values. Adding meaning to a terrain through naming can share knowledge and aid in navigation; embed cultural beliefs and values; keep historical records; etc.
01 Coming home to indigenous place names in Canada by Dr. Margaret Wickens Pearce: using naming to share knowledge and aid in navigation. In her map of Canada, Dr. Pearce uses Indigenous place names alongside their English translations, providing a window into an alternative way of navigating the terrain. Indigenous names describe places of gathering, territorial rights, communities, resources and dangers. For example, Piashtipeu (Where the sea overflows); oskana kâ-asastêki (Where the bones are piled); Apusirivik (Place to learn about snow conditions). The map challenges our traditional understanding of Canada and the division of the land through county borders.
Cultivating
Human interventions in the natural landscape can carry meaning on individual and collective scales - for example planting trees to mark important life events or nurturing community through collective gardens. Cultivated fields in areas of repression keep alternative histories alive through layers of memories (once again, collective and individual) in smells, textures, tastes, and sounds of the landscape. Cultivating land in contested or neglected spaces symbolises the right over the terrain, turning cultivation into an act of independence. In the same way, destruction of cultivated lands imply dominance and control. Through cultivation, the terrain can reinforce cultural identities, create spaces of resistance, restore land, etc.
01 Olive tree plantations in Palestine: using cultivation of the terrain as a symbol of heritage and resilience. The destruction of Palestinian olive tree fields by Israeli forces highlights the terrain as a space where cultivation and its destruction become acts of political significance. Targeting olive groves—symbols of Palestinian heritage, resilience, and attachment to the land—attempts to destroy the physical and cultural connection between Palestinians and their territory.
Commemorating
Historical events can be signified by both unintentionally built elements (ex. natural environments, but also places or buildings representing struggle) and purposefully built elements (ex. sculptures, memorials, planted trees). Many purposefully built elements tell official and institutionalised histories, therefore not always aligning with the lived experiences of the population. Unintentionally built elements are usually more representative of collective memories, mostly traumatic, such as war, oppression, or slavery. Sites of struggle can gain cultural value to the oppressed as a symbol of survival and resilience.
03 Grūto Parkas, Lithuania: curated memorials as repositories of historical narratives. Grūto Parkas is a sculpture park in Lithuania where Soviet-era statues and monuments have been relocated. By placing these statues in a controlled environment rather than destroying them, the park transforms symbols of oppression into tools for critical engagement with the past. This site allows visitors to confront Soviet narratives and acknowledge the traumas of occupation.
02 The Killing Fields, Cambodia: preserved traces in the untouched terrain commemorating historical events. The Killing Fields are sites across Cambodia where mass executions took place during the Khmer Rouge regime, now preserved as memorials to honour victims of the genocide. Rather than relying on built memorials, these fields retain physical traces—fragments of clothes and bones, and mass graves—making the terrain itself a direct witness to history.
02 The Killing Fields, Cambodia: preserved traces in the untouched terrain commemorating historical events. The Killing Fields are sites across Cambodia where mass executions took place during the Khmer Rouge regime, now preserved as memorials to honour victims of the genocide. Rather than relying on built memorials, these fields retain physical traces—fragments of clothes and bones, and mass graves—making the terrain itself a direct witness to history.
Legalising
The terrain can be mediated through less visible interventions, such as legal and economic frameworks, which define its use and importance. Legal documents, historical records, and economic regulations assign ownership, impose boundaries, restrict activities, and determine the land’s economic value.
“Landscapes are produced and constructed by multiple processes, of which some are readily visible (e.g. mining or agriculture) while other equally impactful processes remain more opaque (e.g. high finance or legal frame-works).”
In Search of Nordic Landscape Geography by Tomas Germundsson, Erik Jönsson, and Gunhild Setten
In Search of Nordic Landscape Geography by Tomas Germundsson, Erik Jönsson, and Gunhild Setten
01 England’s “Right to Roam”: shaping public access to the terrain through law making. Starting in the 1400s, England transformed common lands into private property through a series of enclosure movements (later named Enclosure Acts). This process allowed landowners to fence off previously communal lands with stone walls and hedges, restricting what had been shared lands for grazing, foraging, and community gathering. As a result, people had increasingly less access to the countryside, leading to protests and organized mass trespassing ('rambling') in the early 20th century. These acts of civil disobedience resulted in the passing of the "Right to Roam" (Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000)), which grants public access to specific types of open land, including mountains, moors, heaths, and designated walking paths, restoring limited rights of the countryside to the public.
Degrees of Mediation or Materiality → Memory → Myth
The myths superimposed on the materiality of our terrain are the building blocks of our identity and culture. They define who we are, create a connection to the land and each other, and influence our actions. In a digital, global and high-speed myth-making context, stories are progressively being detached from local and material connections. As the connection between materiality and myth weakens, we lose knowledge and care for our physical environment, leading to destruction and forgetfulness. Understanding how materiality becomes memory and then myth can teach us how to weave new stories on individual and collective scales.
The following steps outline my proposed method of reading the symbols superimposed on the terrain and tracing how they morph across myths as an act of remembering and preserving.
01 Gathering stories, images, symbols, maps, and documents from digitised archives or encyclopaedias.
02 Plotting the findings on one surface - digital or physical - and forming clusters based on themes or content.
03 Connecting clusters based on shared narratives. Then, identifying lineages or “degrees of mediation.”
04 Per lineage, formulating the bigger narrative being told - ex. search from freedom, defence of territory, etc.
Curonian Spit
In the case of Lithuanian sea(side) terrain, online archives and journals provide a good overview of recognisable natural elements (dunes, lagoon, pine trees), reoccurring stories (Eglė žalčių karalienė, Jūratė ir Kastytis), and regional identity markers (gliding, bird marking, sailing). The most unique clusters form around human interventions to manage the terrain's natural processes, especially efforts to control the dunes by planting trees and vegetation in rectangular patterns, which prevented shifting sands from continuing to bury towns and protected the Curonian Spit from eroding entirely. The terrain is mediated through maps of towns which have disappeared, through images of planted trees and the patterns they form, and through documentations of pilgrimage-like journeys to the Curonian Spit. Some of the overarching narratives in this cluster are resilience - survival in harsh conditions - and care - seeing beauty and value in the terrain of a homeland and making active effort to preserve it.
Peeling back the layers of symbolic intervention reveals how a physical terrain turns into a culturally and ideologically charged landscape. Reconstructing these elements allows for an exploration of connections between materiality and mythology, nature and culture, preservation and transformation. For the finale of the HeyHuman! residency at Domestic Data Streamers, I translated my research into a proof-of-concept installation, based on the findings of the Curonian Spit case study. The installation combines three elements: a video (containing a montage of archival sea shots), an audio track (atmospheric sounds from the dune area, paired with recordings of folk songs about the sea) and several satellite images printed and wrapped around a rock-shaped object. With this installation, I want to invite the viewer into my process of dis- and reconstructing the Curonian Spit, both as a physical space and as a cultural and conceptual construct. Moving forward, the research can be applied to other landscapes and the artistic exploration can evolve with more mediums and more alterations.