1Fev. – 30Apr. 2025

Expansive Frontiers: Tracing Wilderness is a research project developed over a period of three months by doctoral researcher Ana Ribeiro, during her time as a Visiting Researcher in the Empirica Research Group at Aalto University, under the supervision of Professor Julia Valle Noronha. The project aims to inspire artists, designers, researchers, activists and local human actors to explore the relationship between artificiality and nature as expansive forces. The frontier between the two serves as a symbol of friction and violence, conceived as a conceptual mediator that gives form to the complex and entangled relationship between humans and the environment.

Video: google earth. Visualization of human-built environment expansion between 1985-2024

The Expansive Frontiers: Tracing Wilderness project specifically investigates the expansion of contrasting forces, where a constant contamination between two opposing powers takes place. This tension is problematized through the lens of expansive imbalance—particularly, the encroachment of human-made spaces into what is commonly perceived as wilderness. Industrial sites, zones of deforestation, extractivism and pollution, or, as in the case of the Ämmässuo waste treatment center, or the recent Eco-Industrial Centre create a hyper-proximate frontier with natural reserves such as Nuuksio National Park or ecologically valuable sites like Bockträsk. These juxtapositions produce an effect of repulsion and gradual, disproportionate erasure over time, stemming from the impacts associated with waste handling, traffic, construction, and landfill processes. Even though pollution levels may be monitored and efforts toward energy efficiency and a circular economy are underway, these spaces remain persistently vulnerable to the narratives shaped by the geopolitics of unnatural disasters and the manmade phenomena of capitalism and land governance— forces that, in earlier times, filled the landfill with plastic bags and released odours and gases perceptible from several kilometers away, many of which continue to be emitted today.

From the perspective of political ecology, such frontiers are not merely spatial or ecological boundaries, but deeply political terrains, where conflicting logics of extraction and conservation clash. They reveal the artificiality of the dichotomy between nature and culture, exposing how wilderness is not a neutral or untouched domain, but a socio-political construct shaped by historical power dynamics, land governance regimes, and capitalist expansion.

In the case of waste treatment sites, their often-chosen locations reveal how the consequences of consumption are deliberately managed out of public view, functioning as a form of greenwashing that displaces environmental responsibility from collective awareness. This is evident in the relocation of such facilities to peripheral areas—sparsely populated zones that echo the notion of the "natural state" as something uninhabited, unused, silent, and powerless. Displacement of unconscious guilt as in "out of sight, out of mind," often coinciding with natural reserves, framed as ideal receptacles for the disavowed excesses of capitalism.

In the context of the Anthropocene, a broader territorial reconfiguration has emerged as a persistent issue that haunts protected wilderness areas to this day. As evidenced by a study published in Nature Sustainability by a research team from the University of Queensland,Australia, and Imperial College London, UK, in November 2023, out of 1,721 study objects concerning global mining waste storage facilities, 9% were located within the boundaries of protected areas, while 20% were situated within five kilometers of these areas (Aska, Franks, Stringer, & Sonter, 2023). This issue becomes particularly controversial due to its association with the tragedy of January 25, 2019, in the municipality of Brumadinho, Brazil, where 270 people lost their lives, and 133 hectares of Atlantic Forest and 70 hectares of protected areas were devastated in the vicinity of the Córrego do Feijão dam collapse, owned by the company Vale (BBC News Brasil, 2019).

By tracing these expansive frontiers, the project seeks to unveil the layered complexities of human-environment in relation to anthropogenic landscapes, and to interrogate the spatial and symbolic artificiality embedded in the very idea of wilderness through material and artistic practices that materialize this invisible frontier.

The research intersects the idea of deconstructing waste and pollution through anti-aesthetics, materiality and a performatively fictional approach, envisioning a future in which such boundaries are dissolved by artistic practices. The investigation engages with the abundance of organic matter left behind by the same trees that filter pollution in these liminal zones, imagining a hypothetical material where the branches discarded in these areas could be reimagined as active and political agents of pollution. This was materialized through symbolic hybrid objects that emphasized the contraction of wilderness—prosthetic extensions of trees or ‘lost limbs’ that evoke themes of loss and artificial substitution.

These artefacts were hybridized through organic matter embedded with activated charcoal, developed at Aalto University, intended to absorb gases and particles emitted by the waste facility. Functioning as a figurative ‘barrier to pollution,’ they operated both as symbolic shields and speculative tools of resistance.

The concept of prosthesis was further extended to the ground and to ceramics, combining the two materials to construct water filtration mechanisms. In this process, the clay is intentionally left unvitrified, allowing it to return to the soil or be placed in rivers to be decomposed through time and erosion, where it filters impurities through the presence of the charcoal as a site-specific installation.

The research also sought to explore the relationship between the human body and the act of walking as a means of spatial delineation of pollution, through the development of a ‘second skin’ that both absorbs and protects through the movement within these environments. The performative act of human metamorphosis—adapting to these altered ecologies through wearable suits that filter the air—operates as both myth and apparition of a possible future. These suits are constructed within the same critical framework, repurposing textile waste from Aalto University students and dyeing it with the activated charcoal. Through the reconstruction of these discarded fabrics into modular fragments with organic designs, the human figure becomes obscured, transforming into a social agent embedded within its geopolitical context.

The research culminates in the exhibition “Prosthetic Outgrowths”, which situates itself at the threshold between the artificial and the natural, engaging with manmade objects, structures, and materials deemed useless, discarded, or unconventional. It plays with anti-aesthetics and the persistent idealization of a pure, untouched nature. This practice approaches wilderness not as untouched terrain, but as something emerging from the depths of extractivist ruin and accumulated waste—speaking to a future already compromised.