Minna Kangasmaa | Annelie Wallin
ID:I galleri, Stockholm, Sweden
3.–19.10.2025
Growing Landscapes can be interpreted in at least two ways. The first way is to understand the landscape as the subject of the phrase, actively performing its own growth. A suitable interpretation of the exhibition’s title in this context might be something like ”Sprouting Landscapes”. The landscape is what provides life with what it needs—for example, water and nutrient-rich soil. But beyond the landscape’s traditionally maternal attributes, it also represents a set of fundamental boundaries and thresholds that, in interaction, define the existential conditions for the organisms that live there. These conditions naturally vary depending on the specific characteristics of the landscape—after all, a spruce tree would quickly wither in a desert, and a cactus would not fare well in a mountainous winter landscape. When the landscape is seen as a subject, it appears both as life-giver and law-giver.
Another interpretation of Growing Landscapes is to see the landscape as an object, shaped through the actions of an assumed subject, who does not appear explicitly in the text. A suitable translation in this case might be something like ”Cultivating Landscapes”. Who, then, is the subject with the privilege of determining the form of the landscape? Historically, it’s impossible to definitively identify such a subject. The influence of individual organisms and specific species has not been greater than that of others, all of which have in turn been influenced by the landscape. This highlights the difficulty of, in line with the previous interpretation, drawing a clear boundary between the landscape and its inhabitants—of rendering one passive and the other active. Perhaps the dung beetle and the dung it rolls should instead be viewed as a whole, rather than as two separate and independent entities—a process in which the beetle and the landscape are created and come into being through mutual interaction. For example, it’s believed that various types of algae, over millions of years, oxygenated the atmosphere, which in turn enabled the development of new life forms—who then left their own mark on the environment, and so on, and so on. Rather than being something fixed, the landscape reveals itself to be a dynamic movement, one that depletes and continually regenerates its own impulses. To change one’s environment—to cultivate landscapes—is therefore, ultimately, to change oneself. What does that mean for us, and for what we call modernity?
Text: Arvid Bergman
Grey Area
"The exhibition features my installation, Grey Area. It is a site-specific artwork that was created “in situ” in the gallery space. The material is unfired clay.
Grey Area is a process work that I started in 2018 in Helsinki. I started making the work by pressing wet, soft clay with my hands directly into the structures of the exhibition space, at the intersection of two surfaces. During the exhibition the clay dried, cracked, and reshaped the work in its own way. When the exhibition ended, I collected all the dried clay and kept it. In the next exhibition I reassembled the clay fragments in a new space, relying on my memory of how they had been in the previous one.
Since then, I have continued the work in other exhibitions by pressing more wet clay with my hands onto the walls, into the corners of the rooms, or at the junction of wall and floor—places where the clay might dry, fall, and settle in a new way. After each exhibition I have again collected the hardened clay, and in the next one reassembled it together with earlier fragments into a new site-specific installation on the floor of the exhibition space. I do not mark the fragments in any way, yet I remember quite well where and how I pressed the soft clay into shape.
Each time, the work I assemble on site from the dried fragments comes into being anew. Moving it breaks it apart, as does transporting the clay from place to place. Over time the clay crumbles into ever smaller pieces and gradually turns to dust. "