They Began to Talk

Against the background of an endless vibra-tion, birds chirp as trains rumble by.

- Orit Gat

Visitors to ‘They Began to Talk’ stand in a small room and listen to John Grzinich’s Geofractions 2024 (2010–24), a sound work about oil-shale mining. Estonia’s main mineral resource, oil shale is an ancient sediment which requires an inordinate amount of heat and energy to extract. Just outside the small, enclosed space where Geofractions plays is an oil-shale rock. But it’s the bodily reverberations, rather than the visual representation, that hint at the eerie destructiveness of this polluting process.

Showing works by 12 artists and collaborators from Estonia and other Northern European countries, ‘They Began to Talk’ proposes multiple perspectives on humanity’s physical relationship to the environment. The show begins with an object rather than an artwork: a fish trap made of willow shoots from the 1920s, which highlights how people have collaborated with nature in this region for generations. Borrowed from the Estonian National Museum, the trap is displayed in a blank, white alcove resembling an unpopulated diorama.