The idea of exposing a spruce tree to museum visitors may not seem particularly boundary breaking. Try it and you realize that it is exactly that, literally: a well-grown spruce does not fit into human space; it is too tall, too vertical for the shape of our houses, even for huge exhibition halls. Thus, in Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video installation (Figure 1), a gigantic spruce tree meets you horizontally as six successive moving images, projected on screens accompanied by ambient sound. Together they form a six-partite cinematographic representation of the entire tree in natural size, moving and alive. Seemingly familiar. Yet, as you move closer, some kind of perceptional estrangement emerges—perhaps from the lateral position of the vertically familiar or from encountering the giant alive indoors. The branches, moved by strong wind, seem to be waving and beckoning like the spruce is trying to catch your attention—a multiarm conductor performing an expressive score, alternating between calm and chaotic passages. A couch invites you to pause and watch, listen. Becoming smaller, floating on ambient sounds of birds, leaves, and squeaking trunks, you gradually fall into the rhythm of the giant body. Swinging, swaying inside.
Figure 1: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Horizontal, from the Exhibition CONNECT ME at Trapholt
Note. Photograph by Kenneth Stjernegaard.
By calling it a portrait, a genre usually reserved for artistic works depicting human faces, Ahtila seems to anticipate this unexpected experience of next-to-ness and expressive personality—a sense of kinship rather than familiarity, which stirs the habitual assumption that you looking at a tree is a subject observing an object. Instead, the installation lets you encounter the spruce as a sensing body, deeply entangled with life in its environment. Sitting next to the spruce, with top and root equally near, it becomes visible that the life of the spruce is also the life of needles, branches, insects, pollen, wind, sun, in a constant process of relating, continuously changing what the spruce is. The longer you pause here, the more you feel the movements of the spruce take hold in your body as a rhythmic change. Notably, this heightened sense of resonance is here technologically mediated, achieved by a visual and spatial manipulation that eschews the habitual ways of perceiving a tree.
By placing us alongside the spruce, Ahtila’s video installation offers an experiential, intuitive account of insights in recent posthuman theorizing in which human beings are radically repositioned next to, rather than above, other beings. This posthuman turn has gained increasing attention in the context of escalating climate crisis, making explicit the urgency of replacing ecologically destructive business practices and resource-depleting forms of capitalism (Painter, Hibbert, and Cooper Reference Painter, Hibbert and Cooper2019) and giving rise to a call for a posthuman business ethics that takes into account “not only other people and animals, but all kinds of nonhuman entities and materialities” (Kinnunen and Valtonen Reference Kinnunen, Valtonen, Kinnunen and Valtonen2017, 7).
However, sitting next to the spruce tree and experiencing it as a resonant, sensing body, we are reminded that this posthuman repositioning does not just extend but qualitatively changes the ground of established themes in business ethics, such as diversity, equality, and sustainability. Rather than expanding a rights-based ethics to diverse others, it fundamentally questions the assumption that, on one hand, there is an active (human) subject, and then there is a passive other waiting to be treated (well or badly). Ahtila’s spruce installation does not come with a message to protect trees or take care of nature; it more quietly draws us into the spruce as a system of changing relations and lets us sense our own becoming-part of this system rather than being in control of it. We are experiencing the “treeing” that happens before there is “a tree” turned into a resource for human activity, as if we were placed next to the spruce the moment before we have passed it on our daily dog walk.
Whereas much scholarly discourse around corporate sustainability favors an instrumental perspective on sustainability (Schuler et al. Reference Schuler, Rasche, Etzion and Newton2017), Horizontal lets us sense a preinstrumental engagement with the nonhuman world and exposes our relational belonging to it before acting on it, before categorizing it from the perspective of our aims and projects. This noninstrumentality is not per se in opposition to our instrumental endeavors, but it precedes and conditions them and bears a call to be with the otherness of the world, always already moved by it. It reminds us that the ways we represent the environment also shape our relation to it and thus bears an implicit note to artistic traditions depicting nature. Bédard-Goulet (Reference Bédard-Goulet, Bédard-Goulet and Chartier2022, 310) suggest that the tradition of landscape painting, developed in close relation to the invention of linear perspective, has genuinely embodied “a way of not seeing cohabitants” that bears “a vision of the world in which humans are the only ones who dwell and to whom the non-humans form a habitat,” and thereby contributed to “objectivizing the subjective.”
In contrast, Ahtila’s spruce is placed not in a landscape as seen by the human eye but in an Umwelt—a term developed by Jakob von Uexküll, Baltic German biologist, to whom Ahtila explicitly refers as an inspiration. Instead of seeking a unitary description of the world, Uexküll emphasized the radically different ways that the environment emerges in the experience of, for example, a worm, a human, or a tree; each species has its own surrounding world coming into being with specific perception regimes in which time and space emerge differently. Uexküll often associated living processes with terminology drawn from music (Clements Reference Clements2011, 43), perhaps because music is not so much an artistic genre that represents the environment from a (singular, particular) perspective as it is “the direct manifestation of the energetic coupling of organism and Umwelt” (Clements Reference Clements2011, 44). In encountering the spruce as resonant rhythm, amplified by the cyclic structure in the repeated six minutes of moving images, we become aware of this energetic coupling and its affective, aesthetic dimension.
This points to an ethics that is arising not so much from rational calculation of a self-transparent subject as from affective, prereflective engagement of sensible bodies (Pullen and Vacchani Reference Pullen and Vachhani2021; Kinnunen and Valtonen Reference Kinnunen, Valtonen, Kinnunen and Valtonen2017) and thus transcends disembodied and abstract notions of morality (Pérezts et al. Reference Pérezts, Fotaki, Shymko and Islam2022). Whereas such abstractions, for example, in rule- and code-based developments of business ethics, tend to absorb the modernist emphasis on goal-directed action and autonomous selves (D’souza and Introna Reference D’souza and Introna2023; Painter-Morland Reference Painter-Morland2008), posthumanism implies a more fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject (Sayers, Martin, and Bell Reference Sayers, Martin and Bell2022), continuously coming into being through multiple connections. Horizontal lets us sense this relational ontology intuitively; experiencing the spruce as a multiplicity of changing relations, we also start to recognize our own bodies’ openness and permeability and realize that any form of aliveness comes with vulnerability. It is through such a sense of shared vulnerability that we may achieve “a heightened sense of responsiveness and response-ability to and with—rather than for—the other” (Sayers, Martin, and Bell Reference Sayers, Martin and Bell2022, 606).
Notably, however, technology cannot do that for us. Though technology is alternately seen as a cause and a way out of climate crisis, Horizontal reminds us that technology is neither the problem nor the solution; it all depends on the schemes within which it is used, our register for ways of relating to the world. Ahtila shows us quietly, gently, how our technological devices may be used to imaginatively extend these ways, create new connections, see things anew. This has significance for our capacity to develop ethical thinking in the current context of successive crises, where we can only develop new modes of living to the extent that we can establish “alternative ways of perceiving, experiencing, inhabiting, addressing and relating to the world and to other creatures of the world” (Staunæs and Raffnsøe Reference Staunæs and Raffnsøe2019, 59–60).
Eva Pallesen (evpa@pha.dk) has a master’s in political science and a PhD in management and creativity. She currently holds a position as a docent and senior associate professor at University College Absalon, where she co-manages the research program “Organizing Welfare Innovation.” Eva works in a cross-disciplinary field in between organization, aesthetics, and politics. Her work is published in a number of international books and journals, such as Organization Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, and Otherness: Essays and Studies.
