With this talk we take you to discover the artistic and environmentally conscious practice of artist Alma Heikkilä. Starting from her recent installation at the Busan Biennale 2022 and then expanding to other works and projects, Elisa Carollo asks her a series of questions in a 30-minute Instagram Live.

The work of Alma Heikkilä is often an attempt to represent things that cannot be experienced through the human body and its senses, as microbial life forms that are too small to be consciously encountered in everyday life; forest ecosystems where important processes take place underground and within plants; and many large-scale phenomena that happen at such speed and scale that they are beyond our comprehension.


Despite their gravity and complexity, Heikkilä often returns to big questions such as: what is life? What does it mean to be a human being? What is a human being? How does the body function together with other bodies and life forms? What does it mean to say that life in the biosphere is symbiotic? Look for ways to articulate the deep dependencies of humanity.

As the planet is mired in various ecological crises that will have a huge impact on the future, with her artistic practice Heikkilä seeks to promote different ways of working, acting and thinking when approaching art, he approaches the life of even microorganisms and minor phenomena that are not always before our eyes, but on which our existence and the existence of the planet depends.
This is why natural phenomena and microorganisms are often protagonists of Alma’ practice, aiming at not only to reveal their aesthetic potential, but above all to bring this system of relationships and interdependencies, on which we ourselves depend, before our eyes.

In this way, the artist works against the dominant values embedded in the cultural field that are deeply at odds with scientific knowledge about the actual nature of our lives.
In fact, one of the reasons for the difficulties in reacting to environmental problems is that we do not see our dependence on other life forms and processes.
To support the necessary paradigm shift, we need not only more information, but also different time, forms and spaces in which to collectively digest our interdependence on many other bodies and lives. In this sense, Heikkilä's practice takes the form of an important attempt to articulate and make space to reflect on such transformations.

Heikkilä is also co-founder of Mustarinda, an association of artists* and scientists* focused on environmental issues (www.mustarinda.fi). Located in the ancient forests of northern Finland, it hosts residences at the intersection of art and ecology. Their work and time spent with the Mustarinda group has had an invaluable impact on her artistic practice.