Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis' "Savvaļa" as an Experience of the Non-representational

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 DOROTA SOSNOWSKA Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Non-representational Savvaļa is an art exhibition in the forest, happening in Drusti, Latvia, thanks to Andris Eglītis, the renowned Latvian painter. It offers a unique experience of the scene and also of the obscene and abjection. Following exhibition paths that meander through the forest means loosing certainty about what art is and is not and entering the realm of nonrepresentational as defined by Nigel Thrift, where different scenes appear while not offering any spectacle. Savvaļa, in thinking through the context of the Anthropocene and by taking its viewers into the wild forest, allows a play with the anthrobscene as formulated by Jussi Parikka, while transforming this into a scene of absorption into the world of the abject, where human and non-human lose meaning for real. Anthropocene Anthropo(s)cene Obscene Non-representational Abject Performance More-than-Human Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 Savvaļa – or the savage – is two hours’ drive from Riga, capital city of Latvia. We take the A2 and drive for 73 kilometres. Then we turn onto the local P29 and drive for 26 kilometres, to the point where we can turn onto a small, quite unwelcoming forest road. With every kilometre we gain the feeling of leaving something behind. When we pass the fluorescent-green sign for Savvaļa, we’re already deep in the dark forest. The sun then appears again and we’re on a large green field with a small building in the middle. We park the car here. There’s no more road to drive. This building is a basic shelter, not even a house. It has a roof, and walls made of pebbles. There is a kitchen, a camp shower and some nearby forest toilets. A big light-filled space is a workshop or atelier where I see some painting implements. A bedroom can be found above the kitchen; a huge, green space is where we can mount our tent. There is also a small artificial pond near the shelter. And then the forest, all around. The place is Drusti, the refuge and site of work of Andirs Eglītis, the well-known Latvian artist. Savvaļa, the exhibition in the forest, first opened in July 2020. The title translates as the savage, and this is how it is put in the exhibition’s printed materials, where one can read: “In it, 14 works by Andris Eglītis and other Latvian and foreign artists were exhibited in a wild natural territory. The experience of processual performances, installations and the Savage notebook reading spaces can be undertaken independently or by following one of the routes offered by the exhibition’s organizers”.1 First, we must pull on Wellingtons – we take them from those standing in large numbers in the shelter – and head into the forest. We lose our sense of direction but try to follow signs which lead through fallen trunks, streams, and other obstacles. With some luck, we’re able to spot artworks in the forest. Some are already so grown into the space it’s hard to tell what was done by this or that artist’s hand and what results from the forest’s work. Some are newly installed, alien in that soggy green space. Installations, sculpture, artistic fabrics, objects set in the forest change its space, relating with plants and animals, growing rotten, transformed, maybe even alive. They drop their connection with the human creative act, with the identity of the artist, who can’t be identified except with a detailed exhibition map. They are art and refuse, object and abject. Their presence among trees, by the stream, or in the swamp is uncanny. From hours spent circling about we get our share of mosquito bites, mud, dampness, and scratches – our presence isn’t very welcome. Staging a Painting Andris Eglītis is a painter. Because, as he puts it, that word “has less unclear meaning than ‘artist’ but also because there are right proportions between intellectual work, intuitive work, and craft”.2 He paints, one could say, “from Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 nature”, with no mediation of photographs or even sketches. Yet as Katerina Gregosa puts it: “Eglītis also makes paintings of constructions or installations that he builds in and from nature, mostly using what is just at hand. These constructions become a kind of set in which people perform actions or function as a subject matter for paintings in themselves. For him the act of painting often begins with the construction of this stage-like situations, settings, sculptures or installations in which things may or may not happen.”3 If the final effect, a painting, appears surreal it is due to how reality was arranged, changed, or momentarily transformed before the artist. Gregosa continues: “The paintings of these staged situations function as a kind of documentation, without being proper documents”.4 Eglītis adds that he likes: “the contradiction or sense of absurdity whereby painting can function as documentation of installation or sculpture, although it doesn’t have the proprieties of documentation image. At the same time since my paintings are nature studies, they create a strong sense of presence. I like how this aspect creates an open space for interaction between the real and imaginary.”5 This tension between documentation and imagination centers his painting practice within the critique of representation. Representation as the work of mediation between the actual event and its image, between reality and its documentation, is always ruptured. It operates according to dual principles: always conveying more than it intends, while never being fully comprehensive. This surplus of meaning embedded in representation introduces a supplement that enables multiple, even opposed interpretations. Yet despite this excess, representation is marked by ruptures and gaps; it cannot reproduce reality entirely6. Eglītis’ understanding of painting and his practice can be seen as stating those dual principles of representation. His paintings document a reality that is already staged, reinforcing the excess in representation, opening it to diverse meanings and readings, while this staged characteristic of the depicted scenes also creates an intentional rupture. The image holds its mimetic character but that reality is not “exactly real”. “Only painting is not enough”, he says, which as Gregosa states is “acknowledging the inherent limits of the canvas. His work as a painter therefore consists in trying to stretch the limits of painting as practice and process, rather than object”.7 Painting thus happens through the arrangement of scenes understood as a set of emerging circumstances. In the process, representation always reveals its limitations. Relations between the real and the representational, between the one looking and the one to be seen, can be understood as “a version of the relation between self and other”.8 This marked co-relation is unequal and readily results Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 in violence directed at the other. What cultural theory overlooks, though, is the desire and romance nestled within the relation of self–other and real–representational that Peggy Phelan has addressed with her crucial notion of performance: representation without reproduction. Looking at Eglītis’ paintings, it can be added that another variation on relations between real and representational, self and other links what is commonly called culture and nature or human and non-human. In the 2020 series Some Instances of Encounters between Imagination and Matter (Savage), one sees the forest’s abundant verdant space interspersed with vertical, slim, light-brown tree trunks. One trunk lies horizontally on the ground, another crosses the painting, not upright, not yet laid out in the state of having fallen. Between them, white, an almost abstract shape with a small human figure depicts a hammock from which a person gazes at the forest (fig. 1). FIG. 1 Andris Eglītis, Some instances of Encounters between Imagination and Matter, 2020, gelatin and acrylic on paper on canvas, 154 x 199 cm, series. FIG. 2 Andris Eglītis, Some instances of Encounters between Imagination and Matter , 2020, egg tempera, levkas on cheese-cloth on plywood, 20.5 x 35 cm, series. This hammock in the photos documenting the process of painting looks like a piece of installation art in the forest. Huge white sheets hung between the trees change the space, creating new circumstances, a new scene for life and art. In another painting in the series, a stream is shown in the autumn forest. Trees and plants are brown, the water dark grey. Plenty of trunks and dead branches lie in the water. A small human figure in an anorak, with hood up and a big stick in one hand, stands in the water, integrated with the image’s colours and atmosphere. A big yellow inflatable ring in the scene is caught in passing on the water’s flow (fig. 2). Eglītis states that: “I don’t see the difference between a sheet, a neon light and a tree. It is all nature – nothing contradictory or incompatible. And I am not trying to control nature or to go there – I am a part of nature, and my mind is a body of various constructs, which prompt me to view nature in a Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 specific way. On the basis of this thought, during my most recent painting session, I enjoyed working with the awareness that I am interacting and integrating. There was a tree, paint, color and me – in my wellies walking across the wet snow – giving rise to a situation that one could not have planned. It is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘ecological’, it is simply a moment of being.”9 The painting, in its materiality, is a part of that moment. Eglītis would at times even bury his works in the ground or use clay and mud while painting in a gesture of bolstering the moment’s materiality. Yet as soon as that painting is retrieved from the ground or the forest and hung on a wall, it becomes an image, a representation of the experience, evidence of the process with the culture–nature, human–non-human divide reestablished in its “broken symmetry”, as Phelan would put it, even if that remains questioned all the while by the performative character inherent to Eglītis’s paintings. The Savvaļa exhibition left in the woods, however, as an ongoing scene happening in the forest with or without a human watching it or representing, offers a radically different experience. My walk along its paths is difficult, intense, it hurts (mosquitoes bite and branches scratch my body) and it is stunning. I stop in places where pieces of art are mounted, to consider them as I would in a gallery – yet I can’t, with all this itching, the aches and discomforts, the sounds, smells, insects and feelings that invade me. I’m not a viewer really, but a body entering in relation with practices of other-than-human lives existing with those art objects, using them and transforming, watching and ignoring, finding shelter, treating them as an obstacle. Myriad non-human actors are affected. Standing there I think that if what Eglītis depicts in his paintings are scenes, Savage is pretty obscene. The Obscene and the Anthropocene I look down at the small, rectangular, glass pond set between the trees. I needed to walk from the increasingly invisible path to reach its edge. I’m bent over to avoid branches. In that strange position, shaped by the forest around me as my body reflects it, I look through the glass panel and see little and larger white bones, a fragment of animal skull, remains of once-living beings, evidence of death composed along with small sticks and objects to form a figure, non-human, small but monstrous. Katrīna Neiburga, also a well-known Latvian artist, has titled her work Sekretjiki. As she has explained: “In my childhood, we often played a very special and mysterious game called ‘Sekretjiki’ in the yard. Each child would bury treasures in a special place in the yard – under the broken glass of a bottle, we would make a composition out of very precious trinkets we found – a bead, a flower, a piece of stone, a bottle cork, and other things. The aim was to create a secret known only to you, which, we hoped, would at some point be discovered by a friend who couldn’t help but be amazed by the Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 uniqueness of your secret. In Wilderness [as she translates Savvaļa ], I replicated this game with my son, assembling huge ‘sekretjiks’ and hiding them under car windscreens. We assembled my treasures picked up over the years on the seashore, a place very different from Drusti, in large magical compositions in the middle of the forest.”10 FIG. 3 Katrīna Neiburga, Sekretjiki , 2021, installation, dimensions variable. Material secrets Neiburga gathered for years and exposed in the forest under car windscreens are obscenities that belong to the earth (fig. 3). They are secrets and secretions. The earth’s guts. Looking at them, I think of media theorist Jussi Parikka’s notion of the anthrobscene, formulated while working on his A Geology of Media about material and earthly character in all media technologies. As the Anthropocene frames most discussions about humans’ scientific and technological ‘desires’, Parikka sees the need to also address this in the context of media, defined as tools of communication and also as practices of understanding, using, and looking at the matter. Pointing to geology and the theory of evolution in the work of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, Parikka shows that in science, the earth was perceived as a medium, a “sort of recording device”.11 And media still are geophysical devices. In stating this, he means that contemporary technologies that enable communication, information, and visualization are dependent on materials taken from the earth, such as rare-earth minerals, but he also implies that clay, pigments, and chemicals long used up through our day in arts and sciences also constitute this geological dimension of media. Thus colonialism, extractivism, capitalism, wars, in Parikka’s view – the actual circumstances of acquiring materials used in technologies and in art – must be addressed by any theory of media. As he explains: “But why anthrobscene? Why not just adapt to the normalized use of Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 the Anthropocene? In short, the addition of the obscene is self-explanatory when one starts to consider the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks”.12 Unfortunately, he doesn’t really reflect on the obscene and obscenities beyond the “self-explanatory” meaning of the term that frames human responsibility for the ecocrisis. In Savvaļa, in the Sekretjiki, the obscene that absorbs me demands reflection. I don’t understand it as occurring behind the scenes or as offensive thus inappropriate to display in public; rather, following renowned art critic Hal Foster, I take it as a different kind of relation between real and representation. Foster writes about the (im)possibility of an obscene representation: “that is, of a representation without a scene that stages the object for the viewer. Might this be one difference between the obscene, where the object, without a scene, comes too close to the viewer, and the pornographic, where the object is staged for the viewer who is thus distanced enough to be its voyeur?”.13 The obscene is not “self-explanatory”; instead, it remains impossible to depict, to represent, understand, or attribute any clear meaning. Borrowing from Foster and slightly reformulating his thought, one may say that the obscene happens as a scene in time and space but without the distance that staging provides. Or that it makes a divergence from orders of scene and staging that are typically unified by the logic of representation. In that sense, it is also impossible to see, as there is no way to look at it without distance. Yet it isn’t hidden. It is too close. It absorbs the one who cannot look. As the white bones emit their pallor from under the glass, it invades the body, engages senses, requires some utterly different mode of attention, and attacks subjectivity as abjection does, which Foster analyzes as the mode of obscene art. Although in Savvaļa I don’t feel disgust, no spasm or characteristic scratchiness at the back of the throat, no contraction in the stomach, abdomen, all the intestines, I do feel, as Julia Kristeva says so distinctly in referring to experiencing abjection, “that I do not recognize as a thing”.14 Abjection places the subject outside of representation, in the realm of the obscene. Feeling disgust or revulsion plunges the identity of the one that feeling has invaded into “turmoil”,15 vulnerable to something that should be kept at a distance in order to survive. At the same time, it is only in relation to this life boundary materialized in abjection does one’s body reveal itself as devoid of meaning, signification, discourse, and identity.16 In this moment of spasm and disgust, the body’s existence is suddenly confirmed. In abjection, beyond representation and in a sudden confirmation of embodiment that very much recalls the realm of performance, differentiations between human and non-human are questioned and dismissed, as is that which would distinguish subject and object. Maybe, then, this light spinning in my head that I attributed to the open air is a sign of approaching abjection? Maybe no alternative is possibile once one leaves the zone of representation and experiences the obscene of forest and the earth? Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 Wildness Dorota Sajewska, in reflecting on the media from the perspective of cultural studies and anthropology, has defined obscenity as: “a radical otherness necessary for constituting our identity […] at the same time, by its very nature […] cannot be represented in the order of representation. Obscenity is also always outside the framework of the spectacle. Thus it is not what had been covered and is now being exposed. It is no secret being revealed. Obscenities exist here and now, they remain present, but [...] in a blind spot.”17 This understanding of the obscene correlates with Jack Halberstam’s notion of wildness, which he understands as the state of being radically outside, whether of civilization, of home, of norms and of morality, in the realm of queer and monstrous sexuality. The wild subject is neither human nor animal: “The beast […] appears as a part of a gendered dyad […] and plays the role of the feminine, the subjugated, the silent, the wild and unruly, the criminal, the raw, the pack, the people, the ferocious, the feral”.18 The politics of wildness is full of discursive and representational traps and needs much attention. As Halberstam writes, in formulating numerous conditions for a political understanding of the wild: “The wild, when not figured as either a glorious unspoiled past or an exciting machinic future, when not prefascist cleaving to war and masculinity nor a postliberal, postpolitical regime of anything goes, can, under certain circumstances, and on account of its now intuitive set of associations with the non-human, the animal, the queer, and the subordinated, be available for the exploration of subaltern and subterrain and particularly racialized forms of queer or perverse desire and embodiment.”19 The wild, like the obscene, cannot be approached through representations but only through embodiment and affects described as an “intuitive set of associations”. Then and only then it reveals its power to question binaries like subject–object, male–female, human–non-human. The wild, when experienced as (without a) scene, can be understood in terms of Mel Chen’s “animacy”: different forms and degrees of liveness beyond the human that hold political potential or an archive of “stolen life”, “lives lived well beyond the purview of recognition, respectability, and so on”. It is the wild that scripts lives of those called savages as violent and full of desires. As Halberstam states: “The wild here is not a place and not an identity; it is neither sanctuary nor utopia. The wild is not heaven, hell, or anything in between; the wild is the space that [living beings] share in their antipathy to one another. The wild is entropic, cruel, and violent; it is, in the words of T. S. Eliot in East Coker, ‘the way of dispossession’”.20 The term savvaļa can be translated as wilderness, as we’ve seen in the Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 Neiburga quote above. The exhibition is wild in its existential mode of indifference to human presence. It is obscene in that it escapes meaning, forcing the experience of one’s embodiment invaded by mud, the damp, and insects, while still being an exhibition: a constructed scene. What is it that happens in that scene, which is impossible to photograph or render? I would say this comes from its being a scene of abjection. The objects – art pieces containing some intention and meaning – are falling, losing connection to the readable sign, transforming or just persisting regardless of weather, season, light. They become matter, non-human or more-than-human, inducing the obscene atmosphere of rotting, decomposition, or immutability and resistance beyond conditions, eliciting transformation into radical otherness that, as with nausea, leaves one bare to existence’s limits. This experience, as framed by Savvaļa, is at once that of marking and unmarking – to use Phelan’s words – human and non-human relations and also that which archives the “stolen life” of people in Latvian forests and along the Baltic seacoast, those histories of exploitation and extractivism among cultures and natures orientated to survival. As with a boat in the forest’s midst, mired in trees and partly decayed, that has been set in Savvaļa by the sculptor Oto Holgers Ozoliņš, who named the work Mazirbe – Savvaļa 300 km, and who offers its story: “Exactly 300 km from Savvaļa, in the forest lies a boat just like the one in Savvaļa, entangled in trees, surrounded by grass and small bushes. It is not clear how it ended up here. The nearest coast is more than 100 kilometers away. The size of the boat and the inscription ‘Mazirbe’ indicate that it was used for sea fishing. Since the deck boards have partially disappeared, the frame of the boat is visible. It resembles the rotting, long-dead body of a forest beast. But this is not the end. The wreck of the boat has become a place to spend the night. It is possible to understand how this boat ended up here in your sleep. I have heard stories about incredible rainstorms that washed the boat here, and there are also stories about a fisherman who could not leave his boat, so he dragged it with him until he lost strength and had to leave it in the thick of the forest.”21 The boat was a response to the subject of the fifth Savvaļa residency season, which was about shelter. As a shelter in a forest, it is also a “body of a forest beast” and what remains of a lost boat. But as we entered the scene created by the rotting, decaying boat that, while sinking into the ground, still presents a once-white tarp and a small cabin with a door at what had been the stern – which somehow looks nearly inviting and quite frightening at the same time – I thought of other decaying boats I’d seen two weeks before at the Mazirbe of the work’s title (fig. 4). Dorota Sosnowska Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ “Savvaļa” as an Experience of the Nonrepresentational INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 16 24/04/2025). Jussi Parikka: The Anthrobscene . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Peggy Phelan: Unmarked: The Politics of Performance . London/New York: Routledge, 1993. Dorota Sajewska: Pod okupacją mediów . Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2012. Savvaļa. URL: https://savvala.lv/en/ (accessed: 24/04/2025). Kathleen Stewart: “Atmospheric Attunements.” In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , vol. 29, no. 3, 2011, pp. 445–452. Nigel Thrift: Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect . London/New York: Routledge, 2008. CREDITS Fig. 1–2: Courtesy of Andris Eglītis. Fig. 3: Courtesy of Katrīna Neiburga. Photo: Emils Lacums. Fig. 4: Courtesy of Oto Holgers Ozoliņš. Photo: Aleksejs Beļeckis Fig. 5: Courtesy of Stanislavs Tokalovs and Egiija Smeile. Photo: Egiija Smeile. AUTHOR Dorota Sosnowska, PhD, working as a cultural studies lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Polish Culture University of Warsaw in Poland. Her main research interest is performance theory and history. She is currently a principal investigator of the project “Odmieńcy. Performances of Otherness in the Polish Transition Culture” concentrated on the Polish 1990s social experience as seen from the non-representational theory perspective. She is a founding member of the Institute for Performance and Film Expanded and an editor of the Widok. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture journal.