Astroecology

Poetry. Art. Environmental Studies. Science Fiction. Scandinavian Studies. Translated by Kirkwood Adams, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Johannes Heldén. Johannes Heldén's ASTROECOLOGY begins from an eschatological place: the world as we know it is ending, and this cosmic ending can be witnessed in that most intimate and privileged of places, the private estate. ASTROECOLOGY finds us in a real house and a real garden, surrounded by endlessly meaningful details, arranged with the precision of a Twin Peaks-like murder mystery. In a series of filmic visual frames and corresponding textual notes, Heldén offers a poetics that twists the organic (plants, pets, decay and growth) and the inorganic (drones, data systems, AI) into each other as a kind of avant- garde Mobius strip. A dazzling intertexuality unfolds: Inger Christensen's indexical impulse meets Hayao Miyazaki's surrealism, Chris Marker's stark montage meets Robert Smithson's iconography, Ursula Le Guin's social investigation meets Norbert Weiner's theory of cybernetics. In letting the reader-viewer get "stuck in the stream of evolution" over and over again, Heldén brings us to profound unanswerable questions about the origins of the universe: its processes, systems, and vanishing species of creature and thought.