Artist Olafur Eliasson on Seeing What We’ve Been Blind To

We want to feel that we are safe, we want to feel that we are good enough. This feeling requires somebody or something to see us. Culture as I see it is one of the languages that can make your feels seen made and heard. As a writer, I have spent years trying to help people reconnect with nature and feel what's happening to the earth through language. But some things are beyond words, and language can only carry us so far. That's why I was so looking forward to speaking with this week's guest, the illustrious artist, Olifur Ellison. Over the last few decades, Olifur has brought waterfalls to the Brooklyn Bridge, melting glacial ice to major cities, and even recreated the sun indoors. His art helps bring new perspective and even open our eyes to where we might have been blind. I need to unsee what I have been seeing all along. There's nothing more inspiring than accepting that you have been blind. I'm Willow Duffaba and this is the nature of where we look to the nature of our world for wisdom and ideas that change the way we live. This week I'm sitting down with Icelandic Danish artist Olifur Ellison to talk about the power of art in helping us touch the intangible and letting ourselves be touched in return. I'm a huge admirer of your work and so honored to have you on the show, so thank you. Thank you Willow and thank you for having me here on this podcast. You've spoken about how growing up between Denmark and Iceland really influenced you in terms of seeing the landscape up close, seeing or changing planet up close. When I think about Iceland in particular, the landscape is so elemental and so dynamic. I'm curious as a starting point, if you can speak a little bit to how that shaped the relationship between creativity and the natural world for you. I was born in Denmark by Icelandic parents and they were very young and I was sent off to Iceland to be with my grandparents, who were never there was a chance. That means that summer was maybe Christmas Easter holiday and it meant that I spent the spent a considerable amount of time being slow. One of my earliest memories that I have is that I was at my grandparents house. It was most of them in 72, 73 where there was an oil crisis. Every night I believe it was at maybe after dinner or 7 or 8 o'clock there would be a big bell in the city and then all this electricity of the city would be turned off to say electricity every night. I think it was every night. When we heard the bell we ran to the window, my grandparents lived a little bit on the periphery of the city overlooking the city, overlooking the harbour and the city. There was this magic moment where all the lights would go off by over the whole city, right? But what was very special was that my grandmother typically would come with a candle then and we would sit by the window. We would look out the window into this very blue Icelandic light. And so when we talk about nature we often think about a mountain or river or something. But in this case the light that fell into the room was this kind of incredibly blue Arctic summer, midnight sun. It wasn't quite as north as midnight sun but there was this kind of very strange light. Now that was the city of Habnafjörður, it was called and it was looking north. You are looking up to the very big glacier called Snifersness which is actually not very big anymore but it was then. And that meant we were waiting for the sun to set and be behind Snifersness. It had already gone down but it would still from underneath the horizon be able to illuminate the glacier. And this meant when it was exactly behind the scene from Habnafjörður it started to glow in this kind of incredible red and yellow and burning colours. So if I have any really profound memories of Iceland it was this kind of connection between a social getting together almost around a campfire, this candle there on the table. Us running around with me and my cousins waiting for the sun to be glowing up this glacier and I remember when I was in Denmark after the summer I always thought of that kind of magic type of relationship with all these things that you somehow can't see but you can see if you make an effort. Things that are invisible but if you really look you can see more than you think. And that was somehow maybe the beginning of how I got more and more involved with nature simply also because my family or many families when you don't have money to travel abroad which was expensive back then you would go hiking and you would go camping you have a tent you go fishing you would do whatever the country allowed you to. My favourite spot in Iceland was a place called Lannmannalauga which means the pools for the people from the nation or something. And to get there you could do a shortcut and go through Domadalur. In that Domadal I noticed as a child somebody had taken a Jeep and driven up the side of a mountain through the mosque I mean outside of the road and then I got by the next year oh it hasn't changed then I came back 10 years later I mean I kept going back to the same place and if I go today now it's like a lifetime ago right now it's like 50 years ago or something and it tracks us in there so talking about slowness the particular kind of slowness that Arctic nature has if you drive once over mosque it will basically take more than a lifetime for it to repair itself. So that made me a bit somehow conscious about the environment and to not fool around it and it's certainly not drive across it and the fragility you know this is very fine quality of the blue light and the way it changed when the sun hit the glacier the very very fine changes in environment when the weather changed a little bit and the way the glaciers they would actually be alive it's not just a chunk of ice they are constantly doing something they are talking to you in a sense or the way that if you drive across mosque that mosque is just gone this is not going to be it's not going to come back. So I started thinking of ice and not necessarily as nature but as culture or nature culture something that is actually known by the word already influenced or touched by human activities. It's such a beautiful story and a fitting symbol to start this conversation with because what really struck me and what you were sharing was the parallels I think between ice and art in terms of reflecting the world back to us and you are in particular in terms of filtering and dealing with our perception of the world around us that is changing which jumped out to me was the tension between the slowness you're describing of the living world in Iceland and yet also compared to the rest of the world with the climate crisis how fast and many ways it's changing with glacial melt how have you kind of observed that that tension and seeing the landscape not change as you've recalled but also change. Yeah I think I was on the 23 or 4 when I heard the word climate crisis or the fact that there was something in nature which was relativized by human activities. I am so old that I remember there was nature on one side and then culture on the other side as I talked about before nature somehow was untouchable it just was beyond what we could somehow influence when I walked and height when I was 18 or 16 or 20 when I height across Iceland I was afraid of what would I do if there was a snowstorm suddenly I was afraid of my life I somehow learned to look at the clouds I learned over the years to connect with nature and in some way I sensitized myself I sort of cultivated simply because I had to in a sense when the river looks like this on the surface I cannot walk across it but over there it looks like this on the surface I could wait take off my boots and carry my back right over there and that somehow allowed for a degree of synchronizing that also had to do with time or slowness or because you develop a sensitivity to kind of almost like a way of being defensive out to protect yourself I was very lucky to develop this relationship with slowness or relationship with a sensitivity this climate psychologist who talks about the loss of this connection to nature being a collective trauma and I will say it. Stéphibetna rak. It's not a traditional trauma that you have from a car accident when you're a child or something like this. No, it's more like a collective, a little bit like a legacy trauma from 200 or maybe 200 years ago where we lost through modernity. The modernity took us away from nature. I find it very interesting that the inability to kind of connect with nature is one of the challenges, as I said, we have around the climate and the climate crisis and the whole relationship with the environment. People are struggling to find the problem that they are facing within themselves. And when I started doing art, I wasn't really sure what I was looking for, but I had a sense of, "Here is something that is invisible, but if I somehow work with it, I can make it visible." I want to come back to what you were sharing around trauma because I think about this quite a lot. When we experience a trauma, what often happens is the left and right sides of the brain stop talking to each other. The rational part and the feeling part say, "We can't process this, we can't deal with this." And it's almost as if the trauma falls into the fissure in between. And so trauma in many ways is a separation. And I think more so than solving climate change like a problem, I think more about how do we heal that trauma. How do we heal the trauma of separation? Part of why I was so excited to talk with you is because as a writer, I try to use language to help people reconnect to the living world. And also, there's a certain point in which language fails, where words fail. I'm really interested in the space where art and the visual arts can carry us further into that unspeakable place. And I'm wondering, do you think art can be what heals this trauma of separation? Seeing something that we can see is a little bit like sitting with the truth of something that has pain in it. Even if there is nothing we can do, we can still do something and that is to sit with the truth. What I believe calls for our work of art can do. It can bring to your attention a kind of need to face something that is an unmet need that you have. We really don't like to address it. We talk about climate. It triggers a sensation of maybe a gravity is getting a degree of despair, fear. This is how I'm overwhelming. I don't know what to feel even. I go about challenging the climate crisis with numbness. Sensitizing myself is actually uncomfortable. I get so nervous. So what is the unmet need here? Well, evidently we have a need to feel safe. We want to feel that we matter and we want to feel that we are safe. We want to feel that we are good enough, that we are not a failure. To see, meet and hear what we have to say. Culture, as I see it, and I'm generalizing a little bit, is one of the languages that can make you feel seen made and hurt. If you stand in front of, let's say, a painting you are involved in, an art installation, you are participating, somehow it is engaging and importantly it is embodied. It is not just a screen-based conversation. You are physically present. Let's take an example. You stand in front of a painting. Oh my God, I know that feeling. That is exactly what I was thinking about. That is exactly what I felt. That, intuitively, is what speaks to me. It is saying what I would have said if I had the words. I was just finding out how best to be present to that feeling that is in that painting. It is not me seeing the painting. It is the painting seeing me. It is the book that is reading me back. It is me in the book. It is the theory that is me on the stage. That dance or that ballet or whatever, that street theory or that culture has this kind of capacity to actually touch something deeper and new that is something that you are working on. Questions can be asked that cannot be asked by politicians or by completely cognitive environments. We can talk about things that will not be easy to talk about outside of cultural institutions. Cultural institutions are generally more inclusive and more pluralistic. You stand in front of the painting before and then I stand next to you and say, "Oh my God, that blue collar." Then you say, "I really don't connect with that blue." I look at you and say, "Oh my God, that is interesting." Imagine now if this was politics in America, for instance, or if it was two British food policies. But, Liverpool, "Oh my God, let's get into a fight." It is so ridiculous that there is actually not a lot of spaces left where being different is actually an asset. Diversity. There is a lot of, I think, trust in a round culture, in its ability to reflect something that I have been working on dealing with and I haven't gotten around to it yet. We'll be back to our conversation in a moment, but first I have an invitation. If you're enjoying this conversation or the nature of, I would love it if you could share it with a friend. I think we have this idea that change has to happen at massive scale, but there is great power in one-to-one relationships too. So if you can bring just one more person to our show, it would make such a difference to help us continue to grow and spread ideas that change the way we live. Thank you for being here. You brought in the word embodiment or embodied, which I really appreciate it because I think in so many ways that is an antidote to the numbness and the dissociation that often comes with trauma. I think the first work of yours that I saw in person was Riverbed in New York. I remember having this feeling of seeing this ecosystem, but in the context of a space that was so unnatural. It brought me into my body in a way that helped me to move forward to feel, to process. Of course there are so many questions about what comes after that. How does that turn into action? I think that that is deeply valuable and I loved what you said around safety because most people don't actually have the luxury of safety to process the news or now what is they are scrolling through on their phones. And I'm curious, is that something that you are thinking about often and consciously while you are creating your works is how can I make this a space that is safe for people to engage with something that is so ineffable? I think a safe space is not safe in the way that it's defensive, it keeps everything out, it's not safe. It is safe in the sense that it sets you free to express your needs and boundaries. And it gives you an opportunity to feel that being honest about your uncertainty is a strength. It holds the possibility of you saying, I don't know what to do. And that is my strongest sensation and statement I can give right now. And that I find very fascinating because there is a much kind of operating system that seems to be the manual to everything in success that has to do with if you don't come across as a champion or something, if you are not fast and if you are not always sort of punching your fist in the table and telling everyone to do so and so and being, you know, like dominating or mansplaining. And the opportunity here I think lies in, let's just think of a different system altogether. Who was only podcast also, wasn't it Robin World Kimmerer? Who I think talks about the indigeneity traditions in various forms to not talk about it but to talk about who? When it comes down to our relationship with the world, we in the Western world, we would say, I come from that world, you say, what is that tree? That tree, I say, that's definitely the hundred kilo of wood. What could I use it for? That's what I would say, what can I use it for? Where Robin World Kimmerer, you say, who are you to the tree? That's interesting. I am like, wow, am I missing something here? And then she said, what can I learn from you? And I of course got so touched when I heard this for the first time as to, oh my God, I am, it's not about the tree, it's about me being. blind. So now when it comes to being safe, it also has to do with changing the lens and to accept being blurred, for instance. In an exhibition in Switzerland, one of the lenses was the way we think a dark seas thing. One was a bat, one was a spider, one was a. So there was this kind of more than human ways of looking at it. The more than human, of course, is a thing now because we are talking about giving rights of personhood to more than human. We are generally shifting on understanding, you know, can a mountain, can a tree, can a river, the river Ganga and India, for instance, can they have rights? Client earth, who I hosted only a couple of weeks ago, here at my place in Berlin, where they are opening up a new office, they're from London, they had the air of London, suing the city of London for pollutants and they won. They won the case, because there was too much in the air, there was not a lot to be there. So they represented the air in court. The rights of personhood is also happening, of course, in theory, a lot of the theory is drawing resources from indigenous systems of thinking, learning from them, acknowledging the incredible resourceful material that is there. It's fantastic how we are given the opportunity from reconsidering our lens. There is nothing more inspiring than accepting that you have been blind. I couldn't agree more. There's a participatory element to a number of your your works. I mean, I'm thinking about the weather project and people spelling things with their bodies and your piece that you were just talking about life, the one in Switzerland. You actually had the whole facade of the space opened up so the more than human world could come in and be actually part of the exhibition, right? As the things were bringing up again, yeah, I kind of offered the burying of the inside and the outside of the show. There's a lake outside a small pond, actually, out in the garden. I thought, why don't we raise the level of it? What if it would start flooding the gallery? We have to take the artworks out and then somehow take the facade off. I called the architect. Can I take off the facade? There shouldn't be too much of a problem, should it? As long as you put on the facade again afterwards. In that way, we transformed. I really spent a lot of time on looking at the museum as a structure. The weather project rift a little bit of the fact that everybody in London is like, you know, they're talking about how to do it. It's very cool today. I was like, well, yeah, it's going to snow tomorrow. The weather is the shared nature in in a city, but you don't have any nature left, but the weather is what we have in common. This is our collective space. So the weather project somehow offered some kind of experience that was referred to as a natural experience. So there was this sense of, oh, we have to go and see that of collectivity. Community, I can lay down and do something completely crazy. Somebody brought the canoe and they were sailing around on the floor of the tape. Some people came at a group and did yoga. Some people spelt out things on the road like busco home because he was basically in London. So there was all these different sort of activities that it opened up for. The museum had to start playing, you know, they had to embrace the fact that people were disbehaving according to the normative, how you behave when you're in a museum, you don't lay on the floor. So the firemen said, had to go around and say, you cannot lay on the floor. It wasn't if the building burns and then everybody's running and then you're laying on the floor, they're going to fall. So it also exposed the hidden power structures that every institution evidently has. We don't think about it because we already, you know, we are cultivated into, you don't bring your, you don't bring your guitar and sit in the middle of a joyous show and play guitar because it's inspiring to you. So maybe there is an opportunity in certain types of exhibitions. Maybe there's an opportunity in reconsidering the agency that the institution or the spaces that culture lives in. Maybe they are also restraining. Maybe one can actually reconsider what are the best platforms for culture to do its stuff. But it's why I'm always interested in being outside on the street because there's a great space of the model being in nature in fact. I love that it exposed the sort of power structures of this institution, but through play and experimentation and also reconnection with nature. But I think there's this idea of the the safe space also being something that's not trying to lead someone to an outcome, but rather be a container where people can play and arrive at their own experience or conclusion. I wanted to come to end by talking about Ice Watch where you actually brought melting glaciers to people in major cities to witness. And I was wondering, did that feel full circle to you in a way given what we were talking about with your relationship to Arctic landscapes and being able to bring that into places where people wouldn't necessarily see it up close? It's a big, low social, we got a permit from you and from the city of Paris and from everyone to do this Ice Watch. It seems good. And then there was this terror attacks. There was the shooting in the nightclub and everything stood still. And I was so impressed with the fact that after this terror attack, the commitment to climate was there. The idea was here you can touch the data that is being talked about. And it is literally melting in front of you. And not only that you can touch it, you can also be touched by it. It was blue, those small air bubbles inside and the pressure of the glacier, the pressure of this enormous glacier in Greenland had pressured the bubbles of air from 20,000 years ago, pressure it together. So when the bubble comes as the ice was melting close to the surface, it pops. It says, so when you get really close to the ice, you hear that that's the popping of the air from 20,000 years ago, it's been stuck in the ice and it's actually that air. You can sniff up the air from 20,000 years ago. Or you can just like put the ear to and give it a hug and you can get sort of a nice hug back from 20,000 years ago. So what I'm saying is that it is actually quite literally touching. It is very moving, you know, to say. And of course it's melting right in front of you. Next day you come back if you do, it's half the size. I'm not half, but it's very much smaller. And it takes about a week. Then I chunk the size of a car is gone. Now it says gone. It's now that's in the clock on the Paris, in the sewer. So you know, in terms of fantasy, imagination, dreams, having some contact with what is on the outside of the periphery of the Russian world, believing in something, having higher hopes than what you can actually explain, giving yourself to things that are about dreaming and daring and having courage to actually be strong enough to ask for help. Right to show your own abilities to be honest. This I think is what the project actually is about humanizing or rehumanizing what it means to be present to each other. And to the ice of course, in the midst of this times in which we live, there are great things happening. I am going to be as committed as a care to participating. There are great people doing a lot, but are we meeting our targets? No, we are not. Are we showing up at the right time, at the right place? Are there things that are not working? No, it's not. It is not looking good. But to be a part of something is better than not a part of something. It's a, you know, being a part of a movement is to begin with maybe a good answer. Yes. Well, I think I speak for so many people listening. When I say thank you for creating a space for people to touch and be touched by things that feel so so massive and scale and hard to grasp. And thank you for this conversation. It's a real gift. At the end of each episode, you often hear me recommend that you go outside and go for a walk in the woods. But this week, I'm going to suggest that you find your local museum instead. Our world is changing impossibly fast and it can feel really difficult to catch up. But wherever there are people, there are artists creating the space for us to get in touch with our feelings and discover new perspectives on our world in transition. To check out the specific works Olafer and I talked about in this week's episode, head to our show notes. The nature of is an Atmos podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Immanuel Hapsis and Sabrina Farhi. Our sound designer is Kristen Mueller. Our executive producers are me, Willow Duffaba, Taree Sapares, Jake Sargent, and Eric Newsom. Atmos is a nonprofit that seeks to re-enchant people with our shared humanity and the earth through creative storytelling. To support our work or this podcast, see our show notes or visit atmost.earth/bio. That's atmos.earth/biom. I'm your host, Willow Duffaba, and this is The Nature of. [Music]