The Under-Earths Spin
(Maa-alused ketravad)
Scaffolding, plaster high-relief, other mixed media
May 2024
Photos: Jane Treima
This work comprises an agglomeration of narratives, engaging with the vein-
system of extractive forces in an attempt to bridge the trajectories of industrialization
(& its sociopolitical legacies) with the genesis of leisure culture. Integrating psychospatial
materia from Estonia & the USA and their mutual regional-historical meaning-making
systems, this synthesis of mythologies culminates in two pieces situated within the
depths of the historically significant yet soon-to-be-disappeared Kuku Club, a major
nexus point of initiations for the Estonian art scene over the course of the last century.
Positioned on a scaffold, the eponymous piece, The Under-earths Spin / Maa-
alused ketravad is a coupling of plaster high-reliefs, semiotically invested in a diffusion
of boundaries between distinct countries and their national mythologies by the
omnipresence of what lies beneath.
Christina's Sacrifice II is a metamorphosis of an earlier work, in which the
artist's Second Body drags itself toward a depiction of a farmhouse synthesized from
Wyeth's Christina's World and Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. In this second iteration, the
sprawled cowgirl crawls toward a reincarnation of a recently demolished building on
Sõpruse puiestee, which was dismantled by the city of Tallinn before its completion.
The facade is constructed from the styrofoam production waste of Estonia's historical metal-casting
hangar & artist studio space Raja 11 – also the site of the production of Estonia's contribution to
the 2024 Venice Biennale, and proposes a question – where do buildings go when they die?
The exhibition, which ran from May to the end of June in Tallinn, was accompanied by a small library of books that informed the creation of the work, as well as a publication of my written masters' thesis and this pamphlet (below) designed and printed by myself, which elaborates on the contexts and processes of the exhibition.
Following the exhibition, the piece was moved to Tartu for the group show Enter Woodland Spirits for the main program of the European Capital of Culture 2024. There, it was situated beneath the historical mural Strata Vitae by Soviet-era Estonian surrealist painter Ilmar Malin, in the national museum of natural history. The mural was a focal point for my written thesis and the work was intended to provoke a dialogue between the painting and the sculpture.
Photo: Taavi Piibeman
My written master's thesis, also titled
The Under-Earths Spin, addresses and contrasts extractive industrial histories in Estonia and the USA, which mirror the genesis of leisure culture through the example of the history of the rollercoaster, positioned as the doppelganger of the railroad.
This writing comprises an agglomeration of narratives, moving like tectonic platelets across the body of the text, ostensibly disparate but occasionally converging and mutually embedding one another with
sediments that may alter or engender meaning. Framed as an exercise in psychocartography, this project seeks to widen the act of mapping from a delineation or naming of strata and landmass, into an arena where one
may transmute meaning from spatially mapped phenomena and the emotionally charged environs-as-energy that accompany them.