Oskar Landi: Trekking unfamiliar environments

Hot Air

Oskar Landi was born and raised in Italy. In 1998, he moved to New York to pursue art, arriving with two tools: a saxophone and a camera. Over time, the camera became the better instrument for making a living. With several years of experience as a photo assistant in Europe, he adapted to New York’s photography industry, building a basic commercial and editorial client base that allowed him to sustain himself while continuing to explore the medium’s possibilities.

The relationship between humans and nature is central to your work. Can you tell us more about how that fascination developed?

Personal work has always been my priority. I explored documentary, street, and travel photography, but the subjects I was more passionate about gradually started coming together, aiming at the complex relationship between humans and the natural environment. The region where I grew up in Italy is a landscape dominated by the dramatic sight of the Pennine Alps covered in snow all year around; Mt. Rosa was visible from home, with its peak reaching 15,203ft. That vista was a constant inspiration and a draw to nature and adventure. My parents were passionate about mountain sports and had always taken my brother and me along since childhood. After delving into the urban marvels of NYC for a few years, my upbringing resurfaced with an urgent need to immerse myself in raw nature whenever possible.

What is the premise behind your ongoing project, Voyage of Acceptance, which was included in the Exhibit Re-Connections at the United Nations Headquarters?

In early 2001 I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when the neighborhood was a vibrant hub for artists from all backgrounds. Gentrification soon took hold, and rezoning followed, but the riverfront remained dilapidated for a while, with scattered mounds of waste from demolition, illegal dumping, and nocturnal dubious activities, a no man’s land that often was the stage for all sorts of art projects. I was amazed by the amount and variety of stuff that was all over and started photographing found objects, all of which had components or were entirely made of plastic. One day, I read an article in Harper’s Magazine by Donovan Hohn titled Moby-Duck, which introduced me to microplastic pollution in the North Pacific Gyre. I kept learning about this enigmatic issue and wondered if Polar regions were also affected by it until I was selected to participate in The Arctic Circle residency, an art/science program that takes place in the archipelago of Svalbard while sailing on a tall ship. That’s when I got the idea of building a net-tow apparatus; I affectionately dubbed it Acceptance because it was conceived to “accept” floating matter while also accepting the fact that all human activities rely on plastic.

Top: From Brooklyn Orphans, Circuit Board. Middle: POLAR TRAWL, the Acceptance trawling at Fjortende Julibukta. Bottom: POLAR SIFT, the Acceptance trawling struggling with sea ice

How has it evolved into collaborating with NASA on a remote sensing study of microplastic pollution?

Once back from that incredible voyage, I reached out to Dr. Dierssen, who leads the Coastal Ocean Laboratory for Optics and Remote Sensing at the University of Connecticut. They were already involved in research assessing microplastics on the sea surface and found my project interesting; finally, they were generous enough to receive me and look at my water samples. The lab analysis proved quite intricate, so we approached it with SEM (Scanning electron microscope) and FTIR (Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy), which detected fragments and fibers of different synthetic materials. A few years later, they told me about their upcoming proposal for NASA, a study to quantify ocean microplastics through satellite sensors, and asked me if I was interested in collaborating and providing visual content. Initially, New York offered plenty of opportunities to observe and document microplastics in an urban coastal environment; over time, as I listened to the scientists’ exchanges, I realized that their main subject of inquiry was the interaction of light with the atmosphere and water.

I tried to imagine a satellite’s perspective that would allow me to observe some of the constituents that influence the evaluation of microplastics from space: clouds, humidity, aerosols, sunglint, foam, ice, sediment, wind stress, and wave-current interaction, to name a few. Light itself is invisible and only observable when interacting with other mediums; partly inspired by Thomas Young’s double slit experiment dating back to 1801, I found a way to capture a sunbeam projected on water through a slit, a metaphorical gateway into a complex abyssal world depicting the immateriality of light and the materiality of water.

In November 2023, we had a show at the Alexey Von Schlippe Gallery at the University of Connecticut and a second one in St. Petersburg, Florida, during the International Ocean Color Science Meeting. Currently, we are looking for more exhibition opportunities, and a scientific paper is being peer-reviewed. Despite the staggering estimates of microplastics in the hydrosphere, current accumulations on the sea surface are insufficient for a signal to be detected, but more research is needed. If concentrated enough, surface-floating microplastics with the algal biofilm that covers them will interfere with chlorophyll-a retrievals, which are based on visible absorption features and intended for the quantification of water column phytoplankton, which is responsible for producing over half of the oxygen we breathe.

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 In Plenilunium, you explore a landscape illuminated by the full moon. You have traveled over the last two decades to remote places to observe pure light and form. Tell us more about these experiences and how they impacted your process.

Some of those experiences impacted both my artistic process and my look at life in general. Initially, I was only looking for novel subject matter to explore the sublime and to isolate the nocturnal landscape from light pollution. Soon enough, my early formal/aesthetic exploration turned into a sort of “photo-pilgrimage,” often bordering transcendence, a fascination that has guided me through the darkness groping on different terrains. Wandering on glaciers, volcanoes, jungles, and deserts at times alone and in extreme weather conditions, I learned to embrace slowness to prevent dreamlike experiences from turning into nightmares.

Before unpacking the camera, most excursions involve trekking in unfamiliar environments to reach an ideal point of view, saving energy to go back and not getting lost, small step after small step, and safety first. To compensate for this “partial blindness,” our non-visual senses enhance, and our primordial instincts awaken – the magic, mystery, and dangers of nature become clear – a sensation that reminds me a little of scuba diving, the focus it takes and the occasional bliss of feeling at one with the cosmos. All that said, hilarious episodes often came with my efforts, like getting scared by a flock of birds taking off nearby or getting stuck for an hour on a rock that, with daylight, would take a minute to descend. Humor was also important when, after considerable preparations, weather conditions were unfavorable or a lack of grit forced me to give up an attempt. As in life, company plays a big role; sharing both the funny and the intense moments with a guide or a partner makes for a more pleasurable experience.

You encountered one of these remote places in 2016 as a participant artist in the Artctic Circle residency. Tell us about the resulting body of work.

To a newcomer like me, it’s been breathtaking all along. The vastness, the surreal structures of ice, the smells, and the alternating silence with the thunderous calving of glaciers could get overwhelming. The thoughts it triggered were also fraught with contradictions; the dark side of colonialism versus the heroic accounts of Polar expeditions constantly came to mind; it’s interesting how this place, which was considered dangerous throughout history, has now become endangered because of climate change the year I was there was one of the warmest on record. The main focus of all my efforts was on the Acceptance and the fractured icescape surrounding her, which I found curiously evocative of our crumbling plastic products at the end of their life cycles. Voyage of Acceptance is a single-channel HD video with sound (9.46 min.) paired with a series of stills documenting the voyage and the rugged environment she traversed.

Some of the microplastics I collected with the net-tow method I photographed pinned on heat-colored needles about 3cm long and 1mm in diameter to highlight their elusive characteristics in a sort of inverted monumentality. The “hot needle” is a technique that can be used to separate plastics that respond to heat from organics that don’t; set on colorful backgrounds, they point at the commercial origin of the particles, questioning the consequences of our desires and needs.

What can you tell us about your series Pulvis et Umbra? I assume it is taken from Horace’s poem – and translates as @we are dust and shadows”? What did you depict there, and what is the genesis of these images?

Horace refers to human impermanence and insignificance in the bigger picture, a parallel idea to his celebrated Carpe Diem. The project’s genesis traces back to my nocturnal wanderings in far-off locations and the humbling feeling of being surrounded by infinity. I am fascinated by the similarity between the very near and the very far in nature and how something just a couple of inches away from the lens can resemble distant constellations and planets, balancing between chaos and order. The images depict specks of dust and aerosols suspended all around us but only visible in particular lighting conditions; aerosols are the smallest objects we can observe with the naked eye, and I am curious about their chemical composition and movement in the air we breathe.

You work in video, photography, and sound. How do you see the relationship between them?

They are closely related and never like today, with all the social media content that is constantly shared. Still, photography is the mother of all lens-based media, and the moving image was supported by music and sound from the very beginning before we figured out how to sync dialogue. I love environmental sounds, and for Voyage of Acceptance, I decided music wasn’t necessary; all the sounds were recorded in the field except for some effects from a sound library.

You also take people’s portraits. How do you see the difference and similarity between photographing people and nature?

I guess the main difference is that you can’t direct nature, but they both demand lots of patience and respect. Photographing nature takes countless hours of observation, waiting for the right moment and the right conditions that may never align; this also applies to photographing people when they are not posing. When people are willing to be portrayed, several behavioral and sociological factors are involved in achieving some level of collaboration. Chemistry also plays an important role in one-to-one communication. A portrait often involves the theatricalization of the sitter; people want to like themselves and are rarely ok with showing vulnerability, but occasionally, something breaks through, revealing that the human gaze is not so different, after all, from that of other fellow living beings we share life with on Earth, this is particularly obvious and challenging when we see animals staring straight at us from behind a glass in a zoo.

What is your next project?

I would love to delve into underwater photography in the near future. I never managed to do it much because the costs and logistics are quite prohibiting, but I feel really at home underwater, and the idea has been haunting me for a while.

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About the artist: Oskar Landi is an independent New York-based artist working with photography, video, and sound. His subjects explore our relationship with nature, the visible and the invisible, and some of the environmental challenges of our time. Landi’s works, including portraits of some of the most renowned contemporary artists and thinkers, have been published in major media outlets and exhibited internationally. His project ‘Voyage of Acceptance’ was included in the Exhibit ‘Re-Connections’ at the United Nations Headquarters and has evolved into a collaboration with NASA on a remote sensing study of microplastic pollution.