Looking For a River in the Sea

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, independent curator Christina Pestova left Moscow to stay in a residency at The Mirror Institution on Öland, an island seven kilometres from the Swedish mainland.

How does an island appear from the mainland shore?

In late September 2022, in the mild season after a hot summer, the temperature dropped to a point when air obtained its freshness again. The bus was taking me to an island that stretched out its distant shores in the waters of the Baltic Sea. It looked empty, almost deserted, although I had heard how attractive it could be for the outlanders. Who were these people moving across the mainland to get to the rocky coast of Öland?

I was going there too, to become a temporary inhabitant of the island that was new to me – as well as I was new to it, yet it offered me a bed to sleep in, some food to share, and a house to hide and remain until it gets better.

I felt anticipation being so close to the sea. I could feel its presence while passing over it on the bridge and while buying coffee in the kiosk outside the station. In Moscow, the water that surrounded me wasn’t running free: it was contained, channelled, collected in reservoirs, and kept underground to clean up the space for shopping malls and residential houses, it was suffocated. My job in Moscow was to trace the water and find out why it got detained so harshly. What would the Moscow cityscape look like if we had our creeks and rivers available above ground, for all of us to see?

Here, the sea was everywhere. It seeped through sand and rocks, messing up the horizon and creating an endless landscape. I wanted to believe rivers could run as free as the sea.

Until it gets better

Upon arrival, I developed a habit of coming to the sandy beach of the island almost every day during my stay. I sat on the rocks polished by the modestly salty water and stared deep into the sea. My beach faced the Eastern Bay, and on sunny days I felt like I could walk over the sea’s shallow bottom to check and see how the opposite shore was doing. How many people were fleeing or were already on their way? On what roads did they escape, and where would they proceed to live? Could they see the end of things, and if so, why could I not?

I would sit on the rock and stare into the sea the way I did by the stone edges of the Moskva River, its concrete embankment was notched with the channels for the groundwater and the small creeks once hidden underground. Was it ninety years ago when they were found abundant for the emerging city of the future? How many of them had been fully drained?

Walking along the main river always made me think of how its stream could look so bedridden, the only chosen general line, it flowed as if there was no past and future, as if it never had any right or left tributaries to nourish it. I knew its secret – it kept itself preserved not without a sacrifice. This water body received its grandeur, a full flow by becoming a channel, chosen to demonstrate how a proper Soviet river should look. Yet, water is always “one step ahead of any body”[1].

Wandering around the beach on Öland, I decided to trace its creeks and rivers. I believed they fell into the sea. I knew that every water body, every stream sought its way out of the inland. The flatness of the landscape cannot stop its stirring movement, it passes by human land, our households, fields, and gardens only by chance, blessing it with its wetness. It can be stopped by cities though, revaluated and recounted on its way. But on the island?

I found no trace. Öland, with its rugged and flat landscape, occurred to have very small inland water storage. Lack of rain and lack of groundwater contributed to problems with freshwater. While traveling by car with a friend across the island, I asked her about the lack of it: there is no source for everyone to use equally, both in the northern and southern parts of the island, people use artificial systems to clean water either from chicken slaughter farms or from the sea.

The sea. Does it matter to you? Being surrounded by its waters, saltiness, and rocky coasts? Do you praise the processed water that you drink? Are there some inner traces, flows, a feeling that you are so close to the open sea? She said no.

Mainland / Island / Homeland

I saw a pond too late when we almost passed it by. The pond was made by the local farmers to get proper water reservoirs and store what was needed for watering the crops and bathing. This pond and many others were formed into the landscape, the terra, contributing to the island with their physical presence. These ponds were “brought” to the island by someone’s hands and force, making them a sufficient part of the landscape – although they were never originally there. What kind of water was it?

In one of the books I read on Öland, the writer outlined a theory that every living creature which gets to or exists on the island tends to grow bigger and greater than its relatives on the mainland. Due to the feeling of land, which is smaller and safer, they believed they could enlarge and fill up more space. They form another kind of species more appropriate to their new home. I looked at the watering pond that emerged from the land of farmers. I would not find creeks or small rivers that fall into or out of it, the pond was formed here, and will state its newly born presence the way we are – maybe – about to learn someday.

Again: water is always “one step ahead of anybody”, Astrida Neimanis says.[2]

Mainland. The value of this distant territory is marked with the very first letters of the word. We tend to define and determine ourselves in the paradigm of it being already there, and us emerging sometime after. Yet, do we still belong to it once we leave?

This island, an outlined piece of land, has gone through a transition and a reform. Letting the outlanders in, it had dropped its guard and made its shores so flat as to become a shelter for peoples’ fortresses and castles. They brought their families, their cattle, their habits, and songs with them, praising the distant lands of the past, probably even dreaming of the opposing shores. However, they set themselves in the sea, choosing to belong here.

Just like me, the house I lived in on Öland was a foreigner. It was brought there from the mainland, piece by piece. It was a mansion, a farmer’s house, an abandoned place, and now a residence for art practitioners. Its life and functions expanded and narrowed with every new challenge it faced on the way. It shaped itself anew when the family that cares for it now decided to invite under its protection,  the artists. Did the house too grow bigger once it got to the island ground?

After one sleepless night, I went again to the sea. I expected it to get nourished with the rainwater from last night, to step outside its coast, to reveal its hidden creeks, to flood my rocks and beach, changing its water border. However, it didn’t touch the ground at all, it remained the same, almost mixing up with the pale sky-blue colours. Now I could see why my friend didn’t like to come to the beach. Once you were there and the air got transparent, you could see the mainland. It was still there. The sea performed as the shadow hiding the place we escaped from, beneath the thickness of air and fog. Do I still belong there, although I left?

I keep asking myself the same question, even more now, seven months after the residency and my departure from Öland. I ask, from now on staying on the opposite side of the Baltic Sea.

“Dear Stu, I keep thinking about the experience of living on the island, in your house. I guess, to many of us, the house became something bigger, greater than we expected. It is a pre-existing space with history and family in it, yet, at the same time, it is a space in transition. And, interestingly, this space is shaped together by so many people, the outlanders, coming to reside in it. I wrote to you about the theory that insects, birds, and animals tend to get bigger on islands. I think I got bigger on Öland too.

I hope one day I will be able to face my mainland.”

---

[1] Astrida Nemains, “Water and Knowledge”, in Dorothy Christian, and Rita Wong, eds., Downstream: Reimagining Water (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017), 58.

[2] Ibid.