Reimagining the Baltic Sea in Cultural Productions

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel compiles papers that examine cultural representations of the Baltic Sea as both a body of water and a border between historically divided regions. While the immediate years following the fall of the Soviet Union saw depictions of crossing the Baltic Sea and its eastern shores in the Nordic media as heavily drawing from stereotypes and narratives of victimization and threats to safety to the Nordic countries, in recent years we have seen transformations in the representation of the region, and the sea in particular, both in terms of aesthetic choices and production systems. The sea has been depicted less as a site not of ideological conflict, but rather of human and economic flows with grave ecological effects. The papers in this panel ask how recent artistic work from the Nordic countries reimagines the circulation of people, ideas, and labor across the socio-politically and environmentally charged space of the Baltic Sea region.

Short Bio

One of the most arresting audiovisual images of the Baltic Sea comes from footage of the rescue
mission during the MS Estonia disaster in September, 1994. We see images of two- and three-
meter waves from the perspective of television cameras mounted in helicopters, the wind
whitening the waves, four-meter orange life rafts flipping across the surface. The sea churns
under an autumn storm; this is not the tranquil summer archipelagos of the Baltic coast. “What
sway do [human metrics] hold against the roaring maw of the eternal sea, whose movement and multispecies wonders elude pretensions to a “God’s eye view”?” ask the authors of a multi-
disciplinary study of how we comprehend the sea bottom (Pratt et. al. 2020: 173). Yet, the
helicopters seek the God’s Eye view, as they try to master the sea to rescue victims of the
doomed vessel. The sublime power of the sea is evident in the images of the rescue, as is the will to mastery of the sea, which typically aligns more with images of the beautiful. The Baltic is
most often aligned with the beautiful, in its tranquility, as well as the picturesque, in images of diminutive sites of inhabitation, a cabin on an island here a fishing boat there. The Baltic Sea is also frequently depicted as outside aesthetic categories, as what Marc Augé would call a non-
place – a functional throughway, like a highway or an airport. The ubiquitous ferries are the
image of the non-place. This paper seeks to build on discussions of crossings of the Baltic (Roos
2015), by asking how the Baltic Sea itself is constructed in audiovisual imagery of the sea since 1991. The paper studies images of the Baltic Sea in documentary cinema about the sea, in
particular Our Baltic Sea (2009-2020) and Estonia (2020), seeking to describe and theorize the
predominant aesthetic categories that are invoked, not only conventional Kantian aesthetics, but also in relation to recent discussions of emergent aesthetic categories as well (Ngai 2012).

Sub Unit

• History, Memory, and Identity

Chair

• Mart Kuldkepp, UCL

Individual Presentations

• Aesthetics of the Baltic Sea in Documentary - Andrew Nestingen, University of Washington

• Gendered Tropes, Threats, and Postcolonial Entanglements across the Baltic Sea - Liina-Ly Roos, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Screening the Baltic Sea. A Sustainable Regioscape in the (Film-)Making - Anna Estera Mrozewicz, Lund University

• Smoke Sauna Sisterhood: Sexuality, Gender, and Society. A Cross-Cultural Analysis. - Delaney Michael Skerrett, Australian National University; Nicole Põder, Education Queensland