• 1 See the installations here https://www.heiniaho.com/a-poem-by-a-plumber and https://www.heiniaho.co (...)
• 2 Heini Aho, Interview by the author, 15.12.2021.

1This article engages with two site-specific, durational installations by Finland-based artist Heini Aho (born 1979) that co-emerge with natural forces, such as sea, wind, sun, and rain. The first installation, A Poem by a Plumber (2021), takes place in Tammisaari, Finland, on an abandoned pier where the body of seawater connects with the land: the work emerges on and through a meeting point, the pier, to set a new platform for these natural forces. The second installation, Thirsty Giant (2017), is located on the shore of a lake where water and land meet in Nastola, Finland (Fig. 1).1 The works may recall open-air “laboratories” where a set of exploratory procedures and practices take place. Indeed, the artist purposely installed the works in “in-between” spaces, one on a pier, and the other on a lakeshore, thereby highlighting their experimental features.2 In my view, during the exhibition processes, constant exchanges emerged between the solid, rather immobile installation materials of copper and wood, and the visible moving agents, such as water and wind, as a way to explore the potentiality of novel, unfixed, and co-emerging creative relationalities within nature. Thus, the installations offered imaginative artistic laboratories to initiate reflective inquiries into the agency of nature and natural forces.

• 3 See, for example, James G. Ballard, The Burning World, Berkley, Berkley Books, 1964; Art Bell & Whi (...)
• 4 Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elai (...)
• 5 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Harvard University Pre (...)

2Such imaginative laboratories can become constructive mediums for explorations that can challenge the end-of-the-world approaches to the human-induced ecological crisis, as this crisis has led some to fall into pessimism or despair – as if there is no hope anymore.3 In the catastrophic end stories, natural forces are often considered “evil” actors, as in the cases of floods, hurricanes, heat waves, and so on. Scholars, for example, anthropologist Anna Tsing and media philosopher Joanna Zylinska, argue that these kinds of discouraging approaches only result in demotivating people to act for change. Instead, these scholars suggest the advocacy of interconnected new beginnings and the coexistence of human and nonhuman beings.4 The idea of coexistence broadly refers to acknowledging the contribution of all intrinsic agents of nature to the environment.5

• 6 Jussi Parikka, “Earth Forces Contemporary Land Arts, Technology and New Materialist Aesthetics”, Cu (...)
• 7 James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity”, in Space, Site, Int (...)
• 8 Thomas W. Leavitt, ‘Earth’, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Jack Flam (ed.), Berkeley, (...)

3Concerning coexistence, land art (or earth art and earthworks) has investigated the relation between the Earth and its inhabitants – among other things – from the 1960s onward.6 Since its inception, land art has predominantly taken place outside the museum and gallery premises. At these outdoor sites, many elements that do not usually inhabit conventional spaces for making art became involved in the creative processes.7 For example, Robert Smithson (1938-1973), one of the pioneers of land art, explains his approach to co-creation as follows: “You could take a beetle, for example, and clear some sand and let it walk over that and then you would be surprised to see the furrow it leaves. …these tracks relate, I think, somehow to the way the artist thinks – somewhat like a dog scanning over a site.”8 This quote importantly suggests that acknowledging the coexistence of agencies in creative processes was already central to the early land art of the 1960s and ’70s.

• 9 The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art launched an exhibition in 2019 under the title of Coexistence(...)
• 10 See the artist’s webpage: http://www.ooze.eu.com/en/urban_prototype/future_island/ (24.11.2023).
• 11 See the artist’s webpage: https://www.raimosaarinen.com/#/floating-island/ (10.6.2024).
• 12 See the artist’s webpage: https://annawiden.com/#/materialisering/ (24.11.2023).
• 13 See, Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Durham and London, Duke University Press, (...)

4In contemporary land art, the emphasis on coexistence has become even stronger in parallel to raising awareness of the human impact on the environment. Contemporary artists have increasingly addressed the topic in multiple ways, for instance, by contesting the so-called nature-culture division and the human primacy over other beings.9 An example of this is the landscape installation Future Island (2017–2023) in Stockholm, Sweden, created by Eva Pfannes, Sylvain Hartenberg, and Marjetica Potrč.10 The work is anticipated to endure over the next hundred years while exploring long-term reciprocal relations between environmental agents, such as rocks and plants, humans, and animals. Another example that challenges the nature-culture division and the Western idea of Nature is Raimo Saarinen’s Floating Island (2019-2022), which is an artificial, yet natural-looking rocky island, where pine trees and plants such as mountain hemlock and juniper still grow.11 The artist Anna Widén’s Materialisering (2011) criticizes the made-up borders and dichotomies between the human and “more-than-human” as it resembles a living organism crossing a fence.12 As they emerge through the participation of many agencies, these works (and many others) call us to consider land art and site-specific installation as creations of both the human (artist) and “more-than-human” beings. In studies of art, the more-than-human often refers to recognizing the contribution of all agencies, for example, the artist, animals, and the involved substances and material elements, which all partake in the production and exhibition processes of art.13

• 14 Hanna Johansson, “The Moment of Reckoning: On Forgetting and Remembering the Air”, Finnish National (...)
• 15 Astrida Niemanis & Rachel L. Walker, “Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorpo (...)
• 16 Kristi McKim, Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change, New York, Routledge, 201 (...)
• 17 Jussi Parikka & Daphne Dragona (eds.), Words of Weather: A Glossary, Athens, Onassis Foundation, 20 (...)
• 18 Sasha Engelman, Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices, New York, R (...)

5In this article, I focus on natural forces or weather agencies in the context of the more-than-human coexistence of contemporary art. This subject of study may have remained undeveloped up until recent years because the natural forces, as art historian Hanna Johansson points out, are often overlooked in the humanities and are merely represented as passive subjects in the history of art.14 Researchers, in various fields related to the arts, have recently begun to embrace the natural forces as some of the key actors in further understanding and developing more-than-human forms of coexistence. For example, in their co-written article, “Weathering”, Astrida Neimanis and Rachel L. Walker argue that thinking with weather aims to bring “humans into relation with more-than-human weather”.15 Kristi McKim, in her study Cinema as Weather, investigates weather-related phenomena within and beyond the studied movies from the standpoint of coexistence.16 In their co-edited book Words of Weather: A Glossary, media theorist Jussi Parikka and art curator Daphne Dragona map terms for natural agencies in the context of political ecology.17 Sasha Engelman, in her book Sensing Art in the Atmosphere, explores aerial elements in the works of artist Tomás Saraceno.18 The chief aim of these studies is to understand the ways in which weather agencies can be grasped from a non-anthropocentric point of view. As such they offer rich and novel engagements with natural forces. Nevertheless, in the study of contemporary art, more work needs to be conducted to capture the complexity of the creative capacities of natural forces. Concentrating on Heini Aho’s installations, I explore how natural forces, such as sun, wind, and rain, are entangled with human existence in multiple ways and how these natural agencies actually are creative forces in the context of such coexistence.

• 19 Donna Haraway, “Sympoiesis”, in Staying with Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, Duke U (...)
• 20 Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 10 (...)
• 21 Kontturi, 2018, p. 82-97.
• 22 See, for example, Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, New York, O (...)

6In this article, concerning the discussion outlined above, I aim to elaborate on the notions of autopoiesis (self-creating) and sympoiesis (creating-with) to study the creative capacities of natural forces in the context of Aho’s artworks. Posthumanist thinker Donna Haraway, an advocate of the term sympoiesis, argues that autopoiesis and sympoiesis creatively incorporate a system and function as “foregrounding and backgrounding different aspects of systemic complexity”.19 Similarly, I understand these two prefixes “auto” (self) and “sym” (with) as two vital components of poiesis (creation). They operate as two equally important cores of creative activity, and as such neither of them can prevail over the other. To express this convergence between the notions, or creative actions, I will use the combined term “auto-sym-poiesis” in this article. Relatedly, I engage with the artist Brancha Ettinger’s term co-poiesis which refers to the intersubjective feature of artmaking, and performance scholar Erica Fischer-Lichte’s view on the autopoietic feedback loop meaning that a performance emerges through the involved (human) participants.20 While doing so, I will expand on art historian Katve-Kaisa Kontturi’s take on the autonomy of process which suggests that artmaking always emerges in and through a web of interactions with an emphasis on more-than-human agencies, and is thus never exclusively mastered by the human subject.21 Through the process-orientated auto-sym-poietic point of view, I will also revisit and challenge the conventional idea of the autonomy of art, namely, that addressing the topic of autonomy would automatically mean a disinterested attitude, art cut from socio-political issues.22 In the course of this article, I will elaborate on these notions by focusing on Aho’s site-specific installations which inspired the discussion at hand.

• 23 The two interviews took place at Heini Aho’s studio, in Turku, Finland on 22.12.2020 and 15.12.2021 (...)
• 24 Following Donna Haraway’s understanding of “situated knowledge”, I express here my situated experie (...)

7In the first section, my inquiry focuses on A Poem by a Plumber and its “participatory” agents e.g., wind, seawater, sun, and chemicals in terms of their co-creative potentialities. The second section engages with Thirsty Giant and explores how the natural forces, specifically rain, sun, and wind, make tangible the entanglements of nature and the human within this installation. The analyzed material consists of photographs and video documentation of the installation, and a commentary by an audience member that I collected in Tammisaari, Finland, as well as three interviews with the artist conducted in Turku, Finland, between November 2020 and June 2023.23 While engaging with A Poem by a Plumber I will also reflect on my own embodied experience of the work, which I had the opportunity to encounter on site. In the analysis of Thirsty Giant, I will mainly concentrate on the photographic material and the interview with the artist.24

• 26 Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelley (ed.), Berkeley, University of Ca (...)

10This in-between state of emergence, described by the artist, unfolded through this experimental contrast and also located the work in constant flux. To highlight such flux in installation art, Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), one of the pioneers of the field, uses the term “environment” to include all the active and passive elements taking (spontaneously) part in an installation.26 In my reading, A Poem by a Plumber incorporates and creates such an environment within which a durational poem emerges. To explore this further, let us look at this “environment” more closely. First of all, the installation is located at the edge of an approximately forty-meter-long pier, very close to the water. The visitors reach the work by walking along the pier, where they are allowed to experience the installation from a distance for safety reasons. When looking at the installation site from the angle of the visitors: four, up to two meters high, tower-like constructions made of iron and resembling fountains can be seen. The first fountain, the farthest from the visitor’s point of view, has a ceramic sink on its top (Fig. 2 and 3a). A spiral-shaped pipe goes through the tower by circling it, and the sink on the top is filled with seawater. When the top sink becomes full, seawater spills over to a lower-level, metallic sink and then falls on a plate at the bottom of this fountain. In this way, seawater makes two different types of splashing sounds according to the surface that it falls on. The water itself is circulated by a water pump located under the pier.

• 27 Here I understand the participation in a broader sense to include human and more-than-human agencie (...)

13A question may now arise: what is happening here, in the flux of participation of multiple agencies?27 To address this question I would like to quote Kaprow’s understanding of the term happening:

• 29 Ilya Kabakov, On the ‘Total’ Installations, Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1995, p. 275. See also, (...)
• 30 Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 19 (...)

15To highlight the poetic capacities of the natural forces, Heini Aho just sets the “stage” where these forces can make things happen, interact with the work, and co-create a durational poem. In a similar vein, Ilya Kabakov (1933-2023), one of the pioneers of installation art, argues that an installation artist works as a “director” of a well-structured theatrical performance, and all the elements, such as the audience, light, sound, and objects, contribute to shaping the space of the installation.29 Both Kaprow’s and Kabakov’s insights are cornerstones in the development of installation art in multiple ways, for example, by transforming the position of the artist and embracing the participation of the audiences and the involved materials.30 However, they still mostly emphasize the artists and audiences in the sense of how human agency affects and is affected by a work of art. In A Poem by a Plumber, the emphasis shifts towards more-than-human agencies, more specifically towards the natural forces. The artist limits her agency as a co-creator, or “co-director” in Kabakov’s analogy, not solely as a creator or director. This limitation of the artistic agency may enable the installation to become more than a happening because the artist has almost no control over the installation site. One might even claim that the installation operates at the fringe of the event: nothing is fully fixed but rather a performative event emerges with the participation of human and more-than-human agencies, as Aho points out:

• 32 Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Bos (...)
• 33 Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, Amherst, Basic Books, 1998; James Loveloc (...)
• 34 Margulis, 1998; Lovelock, 1979.
• 35 Haraway, 2016, p. 58-99.
• 36 Ibid., p. 58.
• 37 To see how sympoiesis is addressed in the context of contemporary “Multispecies art”, for example, (...)

16Before further analyzing the installation, I would like to consider the artist’s statement about the installation together with the notions of autopoiesis and sympoiesis. The biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela propose the theory of autopoiesis, which broadly refers to how a system or the minimal organization of life, such as a cell, can reproduce itself without receiving external support.32 Later, the chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis have expanded Maturana’s and Varela’s understanding of autopoiesis by focusing on a simple unit within its environment.33 They suggest that a unit exists and flourishes in an emergent, complex, and contingent system. In this way, Lovelock and Margulis offer a (more) comprehensive and inclusive notion of autopoiesis that stresses coexistence.34 In response to autopoiesis, Donna Haraway has proposed the term sympoiesis to put even more emphasis on relationality and the environment in which a single unit is embedded.35 For Haraway, sympoiesis means “making-with” and “is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems”.36 In Haraway’s thinking, all beings are equally dependent on each other as none of them preexist the relations in which they are incorporated. Rather, they emerge and flourish through this kind of relationality.37

• 38 To see how the notions of autopoiesis and sympoiesis historically relate to each other, for example (...)
• 39 Haraway, 2016, p. 61.
• 40 See the artists’ website: https://crochetcoralreef.org/ (24.11.2023).
• 41 Haraway, 2016, p. 78.

17The two notions, autopoiesis and sympoiesis, might, at first sight, seem to confront each other. However, I would claim, following some discussions on these respective notions, that they rather co-evolve and thus are gradually closer to one another than often thought.38 For example, Haraway explains that “as long as autopoiesis does not [only] mean self-sufficient ‘self making,’ autopoiesis and sympoiesis, foregrounding and back-grounding different aspects of systemic complexity, are in generative friction, or generative enfolding, rather than the opposition”.39 To exemplify this “generative enfolding” between autopoiesis and sympoiesis in the context of contemporary art, she reflects on artist Christine Wertheim and mathematician Margaret Wertheim’s work The Crochet Coral Reef (2007-ongoing), ―an ever-evolving sculpture which highlights the reefs’ manner of the relationality.40 In this case example, Haraway characterizes relationality and entanglement between the human and more-than-human beings as an “open-ended and exploratory process”.41

• 42 Ettinger, 2006, p. 109; Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 38-75.
• 43 Ettinger, 2006, p. 109 and p. 159.
• 44 Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 161-181.

18In the field of art theory, conceptualizations parallel to autopoiesis and sympoiesis have been developed to broaden the understanding of agencies involved in artmaking. These include terms such as co-poiesis by Bracha Ettinger and autopoiesis loop by Erica Fischer-Lichte.42 Ettinger’s co-poiesis designates a creation process as “transsubjectivity” and “intersubjectivity” to include various impacts that affect an artistic creation process.43 The term, then, suggests that artistic agency is not isolated from other human subjects, such as partners and random or everyday encounters of the artist. In a similar vein, Fischer-Lichte’s autopoiesis loop pinpoints “the mutual interaction between actors and spectators” in artistic performances, expanding the agency of artmaking so that it comprises both artists and spectators, as well as the space and time that they co-shape.44 This means, for example, that the audience inevitably participates in the emergence of a performance just by being present in the same environment. Thus, both co-poiesis and autopoiesis loop take into account other human subjects in the art-making process, be it a performance or a sculpture, and in this way contest the idea of complete supremacy of the artist, or isolated artistic agency.

• 45 Erin Manning, Out of the Clear, New York, Minor Compositions, 2023, p. 62.
• 46 Ibid., p. 62.

19In the more recent literature on contemporary art, autopoietic and sympoietic approaches have come to encompass more-than-human agencies. For example, by referring to the philosophers Alfred N. Whitehead and Brian Massumi, artist and philosopher Erin Manning argues that creation “is not a human-driven cosmology”.45 Manning adds that “the field of a nature [where a work of art emerges] is not reducible to me, to my agency, to my volition [as an artist or spectator]. It is movement. What moves experience is not a preexisting [human] subject”.46 This view delineates the artistic agency as one of the partakers in the emergence of artwork and accordingly emphasizes the more-than-human partakers in the movement of artmaking. Instead of focusing merely on the artistic agency, Manning embraces artworks within the movement. This maneuver, I suggest, enables one to notice the complex and nuanced expressions of more-than-human agencies in the artworks.

• 47 Kontturi, 2018, p. 82-97.
• 48 Ibid.
• 49 Kontturi & Tiainen, 2024, p. 242-243 and p. 258-259.

20Following a similar line of thinking, art historian Katve-Kaisa Kontturi offers a detailed account of how more-than-human agencies affect, enable, and sometimes interfere with the artmaking process, sometimes pursuing the intention of the artist and sometimes not.47 Kontturi’s understanding of more-than-human agencies in artmaking ranges from particles of matter to color pigments, and she also elaborates on the ways these agencies contribute to the emergence of artwork in and through certain space and time, for example, in the artist’s studio or art gallery.48 Together, Kontturi and sound and performance scholar Milla Tiainen propose a further theoretical mapping of how “the material processes of more-than-human environs or ecosystems” are creatively interwoven in contemporary artmaking.49 Put together, these suggestions show that the complexities of the emergence of artwork cannot be grasped by focusing only on artistic or more-than-human agencies but rather by embracing their interwoven structures with the given physical environment and temporality.

• 50 The way I described the term auto-sym-poiesis has some similarities to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gua (...)
• 51 Haraway, 2016, p. 78.

22In the same manner, site-specific installation or land art is enveloped by the surrounding environment. Accordingly, in the case of A Poem by a Plumber, the more-than-human agencies such as the weather take part in the unfolding process of the installation. In other words, the entanglements between the installation and the surrounding environment unfold the work in an auto-sym-poetic way as the pieces of the installation affect the environment and are affected by the very same environment. In this article, I propose that the notion of auto-sym-poiesis is specifically suitable to engage with Aho’s site-specific installations that focus on the complex entanglements of natural forces and the coexistence of more-than-human agencies of nature.50 However, it is possible that the notion of auto-sym-poiesis, can also further facilitate the exploration of such creative entanglements in and through installations that operate in undetermined, open-ended ways, or to recall Haraway’s words, in an “exploratory process.”51 Next, I focus on how Aho’s installations generate auto-sym-poietic exploratory processes by addressing the creative potentialities of natural forces.

• 52 See, for example, Hualing Zhang, Dan Li, Ling Xie & Yimin Xiao, “Documentary Research of Human Resp (...)
• 53 Ibid.
• 54 This experience was extraordinary because, at that very moment, the wind blew from a certain direct (...)

23When I visited A Poem by a Plumber together with Heini Aho, the summer was already turning to autumn (3 September 2021). The seasonal transition could be sensed in the chilly air although it was a partly cloudy and mostly bright day in Tammisaari. The wind was blowing a little stronger than in the summer, and the seawater was swashing against the wooden pillars of the pier. We arrived at the installation site by walking along the pier. I noticed that the swashing sounds of the waves were mixing with the splashing sounds of water from the fountains of the installation. The wind was sprinkling seawater almost all over the site, and water droplets were landing also on my body and my face. While standing before the installation site sprinkled with seawater, I noticed a white towel hanging on a bar and flapping in the wind. A note made with blue thread was embroidered on this towel: “100 Droplets Per Liter of Breath” (Fig. 5). This note refers to human breath that contains approximately one hundred water droplets per exhale.52 These droplets often suspend in the air for a while as they are so light – one droplet weighs around one hundred micrometers.53 The note made me realize that while I was experiencing the installation, around a hundred droplets from each of my exhalations were mixing with the work and its environment. In return, I inhaled many droplets from the air and thus felt that I, the artist, the installation, and the enveloping environment, all were taking part in this vital circulation through the agency of water.54

• 55 See, for example, Angela Y. Chang & Boonkit Purt, “Biochemistry, Tear Film”, National Library of Me (...)
• 56 Ibid.

24While I was mesmerized by the splashing sounds and flying water droplets in the air and on my face, my attention was caught by another note sewn with blue string on a second towel: “There are three types of tears” (Fig. 5). This note refers to the three different types of tears that are called basal, reflex, and emotional, and each is made up of different substances, such as electrolytes, proteins, lipids, and mucins.55 All land mammals have these transparent liquids in the eyes to maintain health through basal tears, to keep clean from irritants by reflex tears, as well as to release stress and calm the body down through emotional tears.56 This reference brought to my mind how numerous living beings share similar expressions and coping mechanisms, including sentimental and emotional, via these three types of tears. Saltwater connects the body of the sea and the bodies of living beings as well as non-living forms as saltwater moves through those bodies and affects, nourishes, and dissolves them. In other words, water keeps the bodies in a circular connection.

• 58 In Finnish, the phrase “häh” means what. Häh is also used as an exclamation and implies wonder.

30Heini Aho’s Thirsty Giant was exhibited on the shore of a lake called “Pikku-Kukkanen” (Small Flower) in Nastola, Finland between 16^th June and 13^th August 2017, along a local sculpture path called “Häh”.58 Thirsty Giant also offered a durational, open-air imaginative laboratory to explore how relationships emerge with the environment and the participating natural forces on this specific site (Fig. 6). The used materials consist of unglazed clay pots in various sizes, forms, and colors; piles of wood gathered by the artist from the surrounding environment; a chunk of a tree branch; and three burned or carbonized pieces of wood in the forms of a human hand and a bird. In addition, several participating natural forces, such as rain, wind, sun, and growing plants, particularly grass, co-facilitated the emerging installation site. Aho explains:

• 60 Ibid.

31To set up this exploratory site of Thirsty Giant, the artist piled up nine sculptural, tower-like constructions, which were approximately one meter high, and delicately balanced in a constant danger of falling down. The tower constructions had up to four elements each, laid upon one another vertically, often wooden blocks of different sizes and shapes. The towers did not rise directly from the ground but mostly stood on flat wooden rectangular pedestals. Every tower had multiple wooden elements loosely stacked on one another in a fragile balance. The lidless ceramic vases were positioned on some of the blocks, and this increased the fragility of the setup. Thereby, the balance of the fragile towers and the installation as such remained, as the artist notes, “at the mercy of nature and the natural forces”.60

• 62 See, for example, Benjamin W. Abbott & Kevin Bishop, et al., “Human Domination of the Global Water (...)
• 63 See, for example, Thibault Lemaitre-Basset, Ludovic Oudin, et al., “Unraveling the Contribution of (...)
• 64 See, for example, Tapio Schneider, Paul A. O’Gorman &Xavier J. Levine, “Water Vapor and the Dynamic (...)
• 65 Ibid.

33To make this balance a felt experience, Aho set up and activated two opposite natural balancing processes: evaporation and saturation of water. Rain and the sun played crucial roles in Thirsty Giant as did the human-made construction of A Poem by a Plumber. The amount of water inside the unglazed pots was increasing and decreasing according to the participation of rain and the sun. Therefore, these natural forces provided a certain level of mobility to the installation while keeping it in balance or imbalance. I suggest that the installation can be associated with a natural phenomenon called “evaporation equilibrium” which is central to the vaporization and saturation cycles of water on the Earth.62 A well-balanced evaporation equilibrium can serve to keep, for example, the soil from turning into either severe drought or extreme moisture.63 Furthermore, as all the Earth’s cycle systems are dynamically connected, the condition of one cycle inevitably affects the others, such as water and carbon cycles.64 In the future, due to the human-caused imbalance in the Earth’s cycles, more floods, droughts, and hurricanes will take place globally.65

• 66 To see how the topic of balance between agencies is also discussed from the viewpoint of “Plant Art (...)

34Aho’s installation can be understood as presenting the broken balance between humans and nature in general, and it draws attention to the damaged water equilibrium in particular.66 This reference becomes even more apparent via the burned, charred wooden pieces in the form of human hands that are part of the multiple towers (Fig. 7). For example, in one tower, a carbonized hand is installed to prevent rainwater from entering the pot. In another tower, a burned hand holds a piece of rope tied to a vase and gives the impression of pulling this rope. In my interpretation, these hands represent the elements of imbalance: human impact on the environment. The charred hands specifically address how the increased carbon dioxide level interrupts the global water cycle. The installation tackles human impact on the environment in two ways: first, Thirsty Giant visually presents the impact through the sculptural elements, i.e., the carbonized human hands, and second, it makes tangible how the natural forces affect the installation even destructive way; for example, heavy rain could lead to complete collapse of the constructions.

• 67 Aho, 15.12.2021.

35In addition to rain and the sun, the agency of wind was an active force in the installation too, mostly in a destructive manner. As Thirsty Giant endeavors to make notions of balance and imbalance a felt experience, it involves tension: the installation is constructed on a delicate balance with unsteady fragile materials, and yet it remains at the mercy of formidable natural forces. In this sense, a strong wind could easily break the towers during the exhibition process. The work moves and unfolds through this tension, as Aho aims to make tangible the sensitive balance on Earth.67

• 68 Ibid.
• 69 Ibid.

37When the installation was about to be dismantled after being exposed to or rather co-created with the natural forces for almost two months, six out of its nine towers remained unbroken. The rain and the sun had helped the grass grow approximately thirty centimeters during the two-month period, thus providing a smooth ground for the fallen pots.68 Aho also adds that “most of the unfallen, intact pots were still half filled with water because the summer was rainy in Nastola during 2017”.69 The outcome of this durational exploratory installation was that the balance was partly kept in the constructions of the installation as the work was not completely destroyed (Fig. 8). In my interpretation, this refers to a hope of still ensuring the vital cycles of the Earth more globally. Instead of wasting precious time, it is better to pay more attention to the human impact on the water, wind, and carbon cycles on this planet. Although these natural cycles are indeed formidable forces, they are not immune to the impact of other agencies, especially humans. Thirsty Giant proposes that it is crucial to grasp how human beings affect and are part of these cycles; and how humans can coexist with various more-than-human agencies rather than negatively interfering with their balanced processes.