Upon arriving on Örö two references came to mind
The first upon witnessing the luminous mosses and deeply spongy lichen was Area X of The Southern Reach Trilogy perhaps also emphasised by the deep drenching of military history born out by numbers bunkers, facilities and accounts of personal and their being stationed here. There is no lighthouse, although there is a ’tower’, but there is a sense of the extended sensibilities and perceiving subtleties of flora and fauna.
The other being The Company of Wolves - the Neil Jordan film based on the short story by Angela Carter, with it’s theatrical forests that Little Red Riding Hood passes through. Here on Örö there are small dense areas of woods that one can pass though via curated tails, they have a feeling of the magical and faery tale, so enhanced and flamboyant with their eruptions of deep mosses and creaking trees.
The woods are deeply hued with layered light, this photo was taken at sunset when twilight was encroaching but the sunlight was coppery. The mosses seemed luminous and the lichen full of springiness. One might almost feel a whisper or a hint of presences moving about other than the birds and insects, a slight density of air, cluster of molecules, glimpse of shadow. Nothing perturbing, nothing to be alarmed at, simply senses sensing, as if the air becomes more knowing, perceiving, noticing and ones own perception prickles with that sensing.
So often it seems in writings and declarations by artists and thinkers in respect to our human selves is slow down in order to perceive with our embodies sensibilities. Perhaps less is given to being sensed and perceived as we are engaged in this unfolding of attention, being with, of, on and even integrated within. Hunters do this to some degree, so as to reduce and to camouflage their signals to those they predate.
As I sense the stony lichen, it sends amidst the scattering of impressions something that I might not even recognise as me. As I move across the sandy ground, yielding and taking impressions of my boots as I attempt to take care to walk only on the sand and not on the plants, what is perceived, perhaps mere impressions unrelated - pressures, temperatures - forces that are too dispersed in time to indicate one being - one me. Might the wind as it breezes in from the Baltic with a steady gait not distinguish between me, a rock and a ltree but rather embrace all the phenomena that break it’s movement as surfaces upon which to experience texture, to the wind I am texture experiences with a multitude of other textured surfaces. How I am perceived is indistinct but nevertheless a feature in the wider expanse of time and space.
I sense the sensing. The concentrations of light, the dissolving of edges, the terrains of play eddying. The sensing senses my sensing, across multi foci, myriad pin pricks of infinitesimal moments distinct and indistinct.