Forest Ears. Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė’s Exhibition ‘An Ear for Ecology’ at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center

Selective hearing. This is how one might describe our relationship with the natural environment today. You consciously choose to travel by train instead of by car, but along the way, you can’t resist buying a sandwich wrapped in plastic. Only a few possess perfect hearing in this regard, and I can assure you, you’ve probably read about them somewhere. However, hearing can also be sensitive, and that’s enough for a peaceful retreat in nature to turn into, if not a profound sadness over the litter left by others, then at least an afternoon spent frantically picking it up.

Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė possessed an exceptionally sensitive, almost seismic, ability to perceive the deteriorating state of nature. This is suggested by the abstract, anxiety-laden landscapes she created as early as the 1960s. These works, which speak more openly about ecological themes and are now accessible only in video documentation, were included by the curator Laima Kreivytė in the exhibition ‘An Ear for Ecology’ at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Užupis. Immediately, we stumble upon the word ‘ecology’, much like tripping over a knotted larch root. This broad, multi-layered and charged term is often equated in the popular consciousness with environmental protection, whether through individual or systemic efforts to preserve nature. However, ecology more accurately encompasses the relationships between individuals and systems, allowing discussions about environmental damage to consider factors such as developing technologies, political regimes, and shifting human behaviours.

In Rožanskaitė’s work, particularly in her later years, ecology was treated as an immediate, tangible problem of environmental destruction. Unlike the artist group Žalias Lapas (Green Leaf), active in the late 1980s, which clearly articulated the systemic nature of ecological issues and identified the ‘agents’ and powers at play, Rožanskaitė focused on the consequences of inappropriate actions and circumstances, without attempting to untangle the complex web of causes and actors behind them. However, the goals of both Žalias Lapas and Rožanskaitė’s actions in the late 1990s and early 2000s were similar: to use a unique artistic language to draw society’s attention to emerging ecological wounds, to cultivate environmental sensitivity, or, in the best case, to mobilise the public. In Rožanskaitė’s case, the term ‘mobilise’ included not only her close friends and family, but also her students, who helped create the artwork Forest Ears (2003). This piece featured anatomically accurate, surrealistically large ears, sculpted to resemble the listening organs of trees, keenly attuned to the piercing screech of chainsaws in the forest. By endowing non-human beings with human attributes, she blurred traditional distinctions between passivity and activity, emphasising nature’s role as an active participant rather than a passive backdrop. Today, in the context of the Anthropocene discourse, this understanding of nature as a dynamic and actively life-shaping agent has become the new dogma. It is difficult to measure the impact of these (then contemporary) artistic actions on society, but there is a certain satisfaction in imagining a citizen, X, who, one evening in 2002, transported a load of construction debris in his Opel Astra to the edge of a forest, only to find mourning ribbons inscribed with the words ‘Nature-lovers mourn’ tied to piles of existing waste. Perhaps this gesture by the artist (with considerable help from her family) made citizen X reconsider and, for once, take the waste to a designated disposal site.

Artists who engage with ecological themes (or are ‘taken over’ by them) often face criticism for not contributing directly to the resolution of these issues through their artistic gestures or visual language. This leads to a second conflation, between art and activism, where the expectation is on artists to take on the role of activists. Abstract poetic expression is expected to be replaced, or at least accompanied, by concrete actions and/or change. In this way, transformation is shifted from the minds of the audience into physical reality, or, at least, that is what critics believe should happen. However, does this not underestimate the viewer and the plasticity of their consciousness? Perhaps a precise artistic gesture can penetrate more deeply and have a longer-lasting impact. But there is no way to measure this. It seems that today, art is most useful to eco-activism as symbolic capital, which ‘Just Stop Oil’ activists attempt to wrest from society’s grasp by pouring soup and paint on the glass protecting historic canvases. Thus, through the act of negating art, attention is drawn to the planet’s critical ecological state.

But let’s return to Rožanskaitė. She created her ecological actions around the 2000s, a time when these themes were not overly ‘in fashion’ (although no less relevant) in contemporary art, and before they became unavoidable due to the increasingly apparent climate catastrophe. Once again, she seemed to deliberately resist the prevailing currents of time, a concept she explored repeatedly in the action series ‘My Stream’ (1998, 2000, 2001). By disrupting the flow of time, the artist equated the body of nature, or the planet, with the human form. And quite literally: she placed actual hospital beds in a flowing river, depicting the diseases afflicting bodies of water (First Aid, 2001). For Rožanskaitė, nature is first and foremost an embodied existence, not an abstract category. Ecology becomes a health issue.

As is well known, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Rožanskaitė painted canvases on medical themes, she expressed sharply her distrust of ‘modern’, ‘rational’ and technological approaches to treating bodies. Equally important to the artist was the intangible aspect of the body. This intangible, yet no less powerful, almost pantheistic, element is palpable in her early abstract landscapes and compositions, where works like Earth’s Depths (1976) and Asian Rivers (1971) serve more as carriers of unnamed forces than mere natural formations. By translating natural phenomena and their forces into the language of abstract painting, the artist engages in a process similar to that of many works exhibited at this year’s Venice Biennale: observing and learning from non-human creations. It is a process of learning humility, and honing one’s sensitivity within this delicate ecosystem of bodies, actions, particles and systems, which today is feverish like never before.