Footnote of a witness to an unimagined amalgamation of an utterly frozen sea into a
floating mass of liquid crystals within a single night, 2021: Boat varnish on textile,
Location: Next to the Solkuro beach, Island Örö, Finland
More info: https://www.ores.fi/project/mirjam-kroker/
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Exhibtion view, Örö, Finnish Archipelago, ÖRÖ21,
Örö Summerexhibtion, image by Kristian Jalava
This performative research, 'Footnote of a witness to an unimagined amalgamation of an utterly frozen sea into a floating mass of liquid crystals within a single night', exercises footnotes as both an aesthetic and epistemological tool to document landscapes in flux. Installed at sites close to the sea as possible — Örö, an island in the Finnish archipelago and in the peripheral environment of Ferrol in northern Spain—the work unfolds as a footnote that bears witness to ecological transitions, tracing the sea's ephemeral states from solid to liquid, from frozen to unfixed. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s call to rethink landscapes through an “onto-epistemological cut,” this proposal frames the sea as more than a physical body to be perceived or measured. Instead, the work acknowledges footnotes to engage the sea as a space of relationality and becoming—a landscape where human, more than human, ecological, and temporal forces intersect without hierarchy. By exercising footnotes, I aim to decentralize the observer and distribute agency throughout the landscape, treating each fragmentary notation as an act of collective, non-extractive vitnessing instead of observation. Each footnote, as it records a moment within the landscape, serves as a reminder of the landscape’s resistance to linear narration. These footnotes are an invitation to observe, to listen, and to engage without the desire to dominate or possess knowledge of the place. Ferreira da Silva’s perspective on entangled existence resonates here, suggesting that to witness a landscape is to participate in its temporality and vulnerability, not to claim understanding but to recognize one’s position within a web of relations. This installation imagines footnotes as fractured landscapes in themselves—points of entry that, when taken together, map a process of becoming, not a static geography. This approach seeks to dissolve the boundaries between observer and landscape, asking: How can we witness without colonizing or extracting meaning? How might the act of witnessing remain in the margins, as a quiet testament to what exceeds representation?
Referential Framework: In situating footnotes as the primary form of documentation, the microintervention speaks to Ferreira da Silva’s challenge of "reading without a subject." Each footnote embodies a gesture toward the sea's autonomy and opacity, an attempt to engage with what lies beyond human comprehension or possession. By locating these “witnessing fragments” at the margins, the project proposes an ethical stance—a resistance to making the landscape fully legible or known, allowing it to remain a “black matter,” a landscape in its own right that resists being “read” in totality. This work resonates with Ferreira da Silva’s critique of epistemic violence, repositioning the sea and landscape not as objects to be observed, but as entities with their own temporal and material agency. The footnotes thereby act as interruptions, fragmented and partial—each one a moment of bearing witness that acknowledges its own insufficiency. Rather than constructing a cohesive narrative, this footnote approach challenges to 'enter' the landscape through layers, to experience it as shifting, moving, and unknowable in its entirety. This becomes a radical act of witnessing, one that aligns according to my understanding alinging with Ferreira da Silva’s assertion that to engage with a landscape is to enter a field of relations rather than a field of observation. Conceptual and Practical Implications: Installed on the fringes of landscapes where the sea and land meet, Footnote of a witness invites to being that encounters it to experience place not as a passive observer but as implicated participants. This is not an exercise in comprehending the landscape but in co-existing with it, allowing to encounter the landscape’s multiple states as a series of dispersed, footnoted events. Each footnote is a micro-witnessing—a record of a moment that, in acknowledging its own marginal position, resists the extractive impulse to "capture" landscape in its entirety. The footnotes thus embody a practice of ethical observation, bearing witness to landscapes that resist narrative closure. They also invite a rethinking of how we document and relate to place. What emerges is a method of “non-capitalizable witnessing,” a series of annotations that seek not to represent but to resonate with the landscape’s inherent temporality and multiplicity. This fragmented witnessing creates a cumulative narrative that embodies a relationship with the landscape that is collaborative, responsive, and deeply implicated in Ferreira da Silva’s idea of “ethical violence.”
