Arqueología Nostálgica

Elizabeth Burmann Littin’s Ecosystem of Decay

Elizabeth Burmann Littin: Pupila, 2023, installation view, Two Seven Two Gallery. Photo: LF Documentation.

Nostalgia is a vague, almost ineffable concept – not exclusively based on the realities of history or even one’s own experience of it, but a kind of “historical emotion.” It does not belong to either the past, the present, or the future, but it is somehow devoted to all three at once. Originally conceived as a pathology, many now think of nostalgia as a bittersweet desire for the past and as an affect sometimes deployed to attain certain objectives. In a crucial sense, politics benefits from nostalgia’s ability to write out, neutralize, or revise chunks of history within a collective memory, thus directing what ought to be yearned for.

Nostalgia is a not unreasonable and, perhaps, inevitable response to the distress of witnessing the modern world’s countless miseries and catastrophes, both spontaneous and gradual — in particular, over the past thirty years, the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, the hyper-surveilled anxiety of a post-9/11 world, and the naturalized, incessant burden of information and communication technologies. This same period has also seen a large number of new additions to the field of “nostalgia theory.” In 2005, environmental philosophe Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to account for a unique form of climate nostalgia experienced in communities that have observed immense transformations to their environments due to climate change. He referred to it as “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.” 1

Elizabeth Burmann Littin, Elizabeth Burmann Littin, misty-eyed, 2023. Mussel shells, glass, water, steel and solder. 57 x 25 x 15 inches.
Photo: LF Documentation. Courtesy of the artist and Two Seven Two Gallery.

In her recent solo exhibition, Pupila, at Toronto’s newest commercial gallery, two seven two, Chilean artist Elizabeth Burmann Littin maneuvers between these impressions of nostalgia and solastalgia. Combining her personal family narratives with research into turn-of-the-century art and industrialism, marine ecosystems, and the manufacture of materials such as stained glass and metal, she invokes a complex set of relations between the human and non-human worlds. Rather than a familiar form of reactionary nostalgia that advocates for a “return,” her work offers a patient reflection on the past seen through the present moment and acknowledges everything as destroyed and estranged from its original form.

The artist’s own family narrative admittedly suggests a mythology that looks to the past. Exiled in the 1970s following a right-wing military coup, they returned, after the collapse of the Pinochet regime, to a Chile filled with the ruins of unfinished projects. What began then was a contrived practice of imaginary archaeology, bolstered by cobbling together narratives from various truths and fictions. This particular case of solastalgia, feeling wholly unfamiliar in a place you once called home, speaks directly to the porous membrane that is belonging.

Elizabeth Burmann Littin, *Jardín de mariscos*, 2023. Steel, mussels shells, lobster carcasse, spiny oyster shell, glass, biomaterials, debris. Approx. 48 x 5 x 1 inches.
Photo: LF Documentation. Courtesy of the artist and Two Seven Two Gallery.

Both this backstory and her changeable relationship to her immediate surroundings motivate Burmann Littin’s artistic practice. Her research is, as she puts it, “a reaction to my intense immersion in the environment around me, focusing on the different ways in which cultural logics of consumption coexist with the country’s diverse nature and urban waste.” In her earlier work, she used organic and industrial materials to create sculptural installations that resemble peculiar archaeological sites: rough coral- and rock-like pillars stand among tall columns of smooth, polished stone, with smaller pieces strewn around the floor or propped onto tables like discarded artifacts and trash.

More recently, she has shifted her attention toward water as an ecosystem, a body, a resource/survival tool, and a site of waste collection. Pupila continues a conceptually and materially rich body of work that Burmann Littin previously exhibited in Chile. She describes the work as a tide that comes in, bringing new suggestions along with it each time. Burmann Littin fuses together mollusk and crustacean shells, collected from beaches and food and lab waste, in elaborate forms of stained metal- and glasswork she describes as “mini dioramas.”

In the exhibition’s thoughtful, manufactured environment, with soft pink lighting to resemble the sunset, viewers are encouraged to approach the work intuitively as a back-and-forth historical dialogue between nature and industry. With her choice of materials, Burmann Littin asks us to take a closer look at the serial dichotomies of what we consider to be useful or waste and the place of organisms between those poles. She conceived of the installation as a way of “tunneling,” where visitors enter and move along a path of works emerging from the floor vents, ceiling, along the stair railing and tucked into small nooks until they reach the “clearing”: the largest part of the gallery space. Here, the central piece, beso vegetal (2023), brings to mind a large mollusk, weathered and halved by forces of nature. It is a worthy treasure hunt, with each work large and small placed very carefully to suggest natural growth.

Elizabeth Burmann Littin, *Erizo vitral*, 2023. Sea urchin shell from Ventanas, glass, biofilms and plastic debris encapsulated. Dimensions variable. Photo: LF Documentation. Courtesy of the artist and Two Seven Two Gallery.

Burmann Littin’s interest in the allegedly gendered conditions of the ocean (feminine) and skilled artisan labor (masculine) coalesces in a critique of the material impacts of nature becoming culture and culture becoming nature. She references Art Nouveau as a moment when industrial representations of nature became fashionable and artist-designers pursued the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk by unifying all aspects of art and life in furniture, interior design, and architecture. She believes we are still working through the impacts of this artistic history, its associated notions of craft, time, and manual labor, and the developments of capitalism that made it possible. For Burmann Littin, Pupila represents the Art Nouveau of today: not pragmatic or even fantastical but cracked, exhausted, and in decay.

Elizabeth Burmann Littin, *Cyano chain*, 2023. Stained glass, debris. 58 x 3.5 x 2 inches.
Photo: LF Documentation. Courtesy of the artist and Two Seven Two Gallery.

Here lies Burmann Littin’s penchant for a view of history that is not romantic or melancholic but rather sober. Her use of the detritus of human consumption of marine life attempts to undercut the human-centric construction of nature and proposes, instead, nature as culture. All the mussels, oysters, Japanese abalones, and lobster tail remnants were collected and brought from Chile. In some cases, they were food waste, while others were “trash” from a lab at the University of Santiago tasked with analyzing toxin levels in sea life cultivated on Chiloé Island for sale and export. Most of these creatures are filter feeders, living indicators of the human transformation of the ocean into a garbage dump as well as the demand for more artificially cultivated seafood worldwide.

Burmann Littin grants the organisms, even in their state of discard, an afterlife: something like transferred corporeality. Their integrity as once-living specimens is carried forward with their realities of having always already been part of a massively entrenched industrial landscape. Within the matrix of art and industry, she also examines the concept of the natural history museum, a place now largely considered a scientific institution but originally developed from the tradition of cabinets of curiosity: repositories for artifacts, sometimes traded, sometimes faked, sometimes plundered through colonial projects (of course, plenty of natural history museums have inherited these same collections). In this sense, Burmann Littin’s point about naturalized culture/ culturalized nature rings historically clear as a bell.

Elizabeth Burmann Littin, *Beso vegetal*, 2023. Steel, silicone, stained glass, metal debris. Dimensions variable. Photo: LF Documentation. Courtesy of the artist and Two Seven Two Gallery.

Not adhering strictly to the melancholy or homesickness of nostalgia and solastalgia, I would characterize Burmann Littin’s “historical emotion” as reminiscent of a profound sense of duty to explore the many layers of illusion under which we all live. Things are fucked up now, but in one way or another they always were. When it comes to conceiving of the past and our emotional reactions to it, clarity is slippery. Of course, there are certain objective realities and events that undeniably took place. But since memory itself is not a completely solid base for forming an identity and navigating the world, what is left is narrative. Nostalgia as a distortion of memory begs the question of who benefits from it.

Pupila is itself an ecosystem and a set of challenges. On deep inspection, its world is a series of dialectics – past and present, pluralistic and parochial, artificial and organic, progressive and traditional, moral and political, real and imaginary. The works in the installation house within them trajectories of historical materialism as they relate to labour, time, industry, art, and the natural world. What a pleasure it is to be encouraged to reflect on the many complexities of life on Earth as historically constituted parts of an inconceivable whole. It’s no wonder nostalgia is a persistent topic of mainstream discourse. How else could we live with what we have inherited, what we know, and who we are but to feel homesick now and again for a home we do not recognize and perhaps never really knew.

1 Glenn A. Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

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