KATI ROOVER

Scent of the Changing Sea

The Scent of the Changing Sea is video essay and installation that weaves together multisensory experiential knowledge and scientific observations in a poetic reflection on the possible futures of the Baltic Sea. The video essay approaches empathically the marine ecosystems and their manifold transformations.

 

Video installation 14:30 min

2020 - 2022

 

Commissioned by CAA -  Contemporary Art Archipelago in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute (University of Turku) in the project Spectres in Change.

Together with SYKE - Finnish Environment Institute.

 

 https://contemporaryartarchipelago.org

 

 

 

Salt of My Eyes

When the songs of humpback whales were released to the public domain in 1970 it was another kind of stunning encounter - not one that was terrifying (though it may also have been so) but rather, inspiring. That they sang - something humans hold dear, one of our deepest, broadest, most complex, yet most common arts of self-expression - forced us to confront consciousness beyond the human. That humpbacks sing changed everything.

 

Salt of My Eyes is a poetic essay film about the attempt to connect with the ”the mysterious other” whose culture and life is still out of reach but who are constantly disturbed and destroyed by human actions. In the film I observe the culturally complex human and whale relationship, the origin and the end of life on earth and myths and dreams of becoming wanderer of the big oceans.

 

 Video installation 14:03 min, 2020

Do Rivers Really Ever End

Do Rivers Really Ever End is a poetic essay film, in which the personal, indigenous/local, mythological and scientific knowledge are combined. What are the poetic and life giving significances of river waters for individuals, communities, and other beings? What happens when a person enters into the flow of the river ecosystem and influences and is influenced by its cycles. What does it mean for a river, and its associated natural elements, to have rights?

 

Do Rivers Really Ever End is an attempt to feel empathy toward these inanimate flowing ecosystems, rivers, flowing waters at the time when life giving river and freshwater ecosystems are drying, are dammed, polluted and transformed.

 

Inspired by Võhandu river in Estonia, Klong Saeng river in Thailand, Whanganui river in New Zealand, Amazon rivers Rio Negro and Solimōes in Brazil, Deatnu (Teno) river in Northern Finland, Glacier rivers in East-Iceland, Alpine rivers in Italy and Red river in Canada.

 

Full HD video 24:51min, 2017-2020

H2O - Creatures

H2O - Creatures is a process of looking at the massive cultural changes where water’s cyclical time were condensed into simple H2O form.  The mythical stories of water gave way to the linear time defined by a man. Human watery organs and the efficient processes created by them, work as modifiers of water structure and it’s flows in the environment. Water has become a commercially available, and manageable and disappearing material or a hidden landfill.

 

However, as an element, water is still like a permeable channel, a cyclical cycle of time and an all-embracing sensor: by its very nature, a state that registers change and challenges the senses to a different experience of reality.

 

Sound pieces and publication / artist book 2019 - 2023