Sea Library | Anna Iltnere
On opening a Sea Library by the Baltic Sea
In the summer of 2018 Anna Iltnere opened a Sea Library in Jurmala, Latvia; moving her young family from central Riga to an old riverside house on the coast. She left behind her previous life as an arts journalist and became obsessed with all things sea. Here, Anna outlines her journey, and the profound affect opening the growing library has had on her life.
Anna Iltnere
Time is a strange thing. I remember a summer’s day when I wasn’t yet a sea librarian, entering a room full of other art journalists in Kassel, a city on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany, with cute trams running up and down green hills. I found an empty seat and sat down to listen to South African artist William Kentridge giving a lecture on time, clocks and trains. Kentridge was dressed in his trademark black trousers, hair almost as white as his customary white shirt. I had my thumb on a voice recorder.
Kentridge setting up The Refusal of Time at documenta (13) | Image: Axel Stalljohann (public domain)
For one hundred days Kassel was taken over by documenta (13) – a city-wide exhibition happening every five years. Kentridge’s artwork The Refusal of Time was exhibited in Hauptbahnhof, a disused train station. During the nineties, it was turned into a KulturBahnhof with art galleries, a cinema, an architecture centre, caricature museum and restaurants. Once people were hurrying through to get on a train on time. Now The Refusal of Time, an immersive video installation, was shown simultaneously on five screens with a breathing machine – called “an elephant” – in the middle of the hall. The elephant is a reference to Charles Dicken’s book Hard Times, in which machines move ‘like an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.’ The refusal of time on an individual level is the refusal to accept that we are all going to die one day. On a global level, it is the refusal of inventions and conventions created in an attempt to control time. During the lecture, Kentridge explored how the invention of trains connecting places necessitated a more precise time – a clock with exact minutes, synchronised between many places. Otherwise, it just wouldn't work.
Later in the evening three of us misread a timetable at the Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station and boarded a train – the last train that night – going in the opposite direction. It took us further and further from our hotel in the middle of the night until we realised our mistake and disembarked. I wished I could have borrowed a time machine, and avoided spending almost my entire next day’s per diem on the taxi-fare. My bed was in old monastery miles away. I didn’t have time on my side. It feels like another life now, but it was only nine years ago.
I was close to a nervous breakdown in Kassel and felt a kinship with artworks by French artist Pierre Huyghe – a sculpture of a reclining woman with a beehive on her head, set up next to a compost heap and ghost-like dog (a white Spanish greyhound named Human) with one leg painted bright pink. The slender greyhound was running around the city parks unattended. I think I unconsciously refused to accept the race against the clock that my job demanded and was overwhelmed with the amount of outstanding art to be experienced in just a couple of days. My head was buzzing with bees. I had grown up in a family of artists as a perpetual viewer. I knew how rewarding it can be to spend a long time with one artwork, to see it in daylight and in the dark when you are fully awake or still sleepy. To see what it does to you and how it changes over time under your gaze. A chance to visit biennales, art fairs, and exhibitions like documenta was a dream come true for an art lover like me but soon turned into a nightmare. You know, the one where you can’t run with leaden legs.
Tempelhofer Field, Berlin | Image: Jonas Tebbe (Unsplash)
I also remember that summer well because I took a much-needed vacation after Kassel and travelled with my family to Berlin to stay there for a couple of weeks. I was mesmerised by the Berlin Tempelhof Airport, designed by Reich, one of the first airports in Berlin. It’s been out of use since 2008, and the former airfield has been turned into a spacious park for joggers, dancers, skaters, and our little boy on his dip dap bike. It’s now called Tempelhofer Field. There is something so haunting and beautiful about abandoned train stations and airports thriving as cultural places: a refusal of constantly moving forward, a ticket to stay and create. They also served as a silent sign for my own future decision to anchor myself, to find another kind of time by the sea.
The following autumn, we moved to a seaside town. We left our apartment in Riga and moved into an old wooden house in Jurmala. It’s not so easy to imagine this dark red shell standing silently for a hundred years before us and yet it has done exactly that. The slow time of trees, stones and old walls captured my soul. The river flows past the house, the sea roars in a distance.
Time is a big thing. Five thousand years ago my city was under an ancient Littorina Sea. Here in Jurmala you can wander the Green dune, an ancient shoreline of the Littorina Sea, now covered in pines and moss. Let’s travel back four thousand more years: this spot in a map where I am sitting now and writing on my laptop was under Ancylus lake back then. It was a large freshwater lake that existed in northern Europe and is one of the various predecessors of the Baltic Sea. We can go back as far as to the beginning of the Holocene, or even further if you want. Twelve thousand years ago Sea Library was deep beneath the Baltic Ice Lake. Not the house, of course, it’s not that old, but its ghost from the future for sure. It lies deep down under ancient seas and ice lakes as a potential outline and waits for its day to come.
Can we travel now in the other direction? A thousand, five thousand, ten thousand years into the future? Can you imagine a step forward like that? Will the city on this narrow sand peninsula, once an ancient seabed, be under the sea again? Jurmala stands right on the edge of the water. Even its name suggests that. Jurmala is made from two Latvian words: the sea and the edge. “Time itself is like the sea,” writes Rachel Carson, “containing all that came before us, sooner or later sweeping us away on its flood and washing over and obliterating the traces of our presence, as the sea this morning erased the footprints of the bird.” Robert Macfarlane in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey writes that deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. “Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates.” Macfarlane reminds us that deep time opens into the future as well as the past. It gives us a different kind of awareness. The author quotes immunologist Jonas Salk, asking what Anthropocene, an age when Earth is shaped by human action, asks of us: “Are we good ancestors?”
Our ability to travel the globe is fascinating. Airplanes, ships, cars, fast trains are crossing the time zones like slices of a round cake. To get to another country in just a few hours, by flying over the clouds, is so close to an ability to enter another dimension. How cool is that? Especially now, after so many months locked in our households. And yet I remember my dad when I asked him as a kid, is there another dimension, does he believe in such thing? He looked at me, paused for a while, and showed me on his strong artist’s hands that yes but not the way I described it to him. It is not a world out there, he said, it is somewhere deep inside. He shows me his thumb and explains, “Anna, if you could travel under my nail, a huge dimension would suddenly open up. That’s what I believe” he says.
When we moved into this wooden house, I slowly became obsessed. I wanted to travel in and not out anymore. To travel straight into the spiky tufts of Marram grass, into the silky beach sand particles, teeny tiny rocks on my palm. The shoreline fascinated me, but there was also the sea. It broke the walls and rules, it gnawed on dunes and just didn’t care at all! The sea looked both present and timeless all at the same time, and never the same twice. The sea was an impossible liquid paradox that made me completely addicted to it: to be beside the sea and look. I had become a perpetual viewer again. Only now it was the sea I was looking at. In summer, autumn, winter, and spring. In pink morning light and indigo darkness. I had to check how it looks when it rains, when it snows, when it is calm before the storm. Is it grey under an overcast sky or maybe slightly black? I have to see, I have to see. At the beach, I feel that I have all the time in the world: one never-ending moment. The hands of my watch have collapsed into a funny pile under the glass.
“And the sea rolled on as it had been rolling for five thousand years,” says Ishmael in Moby Dick. I soon started to read books about the sea, to learn how writers have tried to describe the enigmatic, magnetic sea. Reading itself became an anchor in time. Books flooded the house. One thing led to another, and nearly three years ago I had an idea to open a Sea Library here, where we live, on the edge of the sea. I continue to collect books about oceans and islands and whales and lend them to people to read as fast or as slow as they want: on their own time. Books and my bike to the beach have become my only means of travelling. Not that I wouldn’t want to go to Venice again and dangle my bare feet in the pulpy blue-green waters of its canals or wander the cobbled intoxicating streets of Amsterdam. But what I wanted even more now was to experience another way of being, by sitting still and going under an artist’s thumbnail.
One year after The Refusal of Time, William Kentridge creates a flipbook film A Second-Hand Reading from drawings on the pages of old books. As pages flip, a narrative unfolds. Kentridge himself wanders the pages as a drawn character in black and white. With hands in his pockets, he walks as if daydreaming. Birds and trees, and typewriters appear around him drawn in charcoal, ink and watercolour and are rubbed out. Phrases appear in large letters, including “Whichever page you open, there you are.”
The last time I swam in the Baltic Sea was in late autumn before a very cold winter when the sea froze for a long stretch. The ice has almost melted now and I will hopefully be back in the water when crocuses sprout and wild geese return, flying over my wet hair. On my last swim, I thought about the unimaginable fact that the Baltic Sea is one of the most polluted seas in the world. I can’t see that, no plastic bags are floating around in the water, the shoreline is very clean, but the water isn’t. It sometimes blooms in hot summers with toxic algae.
In Underland Robert Macfarlane writes that deep time awareness doesn’t mean that we have to become inert. There’s an urgency, especially now, on my threshold too. The Baltic Sea is also the sea of Tove Jansson and her Moomins. Last year marked 75 years since Finnish writer and artist wrote her first story about Moomins, The Moomins and the Great Flood, which takes place in the middle of a natural disaster. To celebrate the anniversary, Moomin Characters Ltd together with its partners launched a campaign to save the Baltic Sea from the blue-green algae. For every 10 euros donated 40 kilograms of toxic algae will be removed from the sea. The campaign has been extended until the end of July. To take part you can make a direct donation or learn more about the sea, the challenges it faces and the solutions needed to help it. Don’t pee in the sea! It is one of the things you can start with. (If you pee like seven times, you help to grow four kilograms of toxic algae.)
Recently an ambitious and useful handbook was published, Future Sea: How to Rescue and Protect the World’s Ocean by Deborah Rowan Wright. It is an eye-opening book that will fill your soul with the right amount of optimism and call for action. It will tell you in an easy-to-read step-by-step outline of how to save the planet’s seas. “No, no. You can’t protect all the sea. All of the sea? That’s ridiculous,” a person the author meets but doesn’t mention his name, a long-standing environmental campaigner, shakes his head in disbelief. But the book explains how it is possible by modernising and updating the Law of the Sea and also by such small changes as not flying as much and carefully choosing what seafood you consume.
There are now around 600 books in the Sea Library in English, German, French, Russian and Latvian. It is a quiet place that doesn’t campaign loudly. In the age of urgency and crisis I believe or maybe hope that giving a book to a reader no matter how poor or rich one is can make someone fall in love with the sea. You want to protect what you love. Some time ago I read Edward O. Wilson’s piece in the New York Times about millions of species going quietly extinct: insects, spiders, mites, fungi and other “little things that run the world”. After reading this essay I dreamed that my dad had created a couple of delicate and fragile artworks: tiny beautiful sculptures. To protect them, I put each miniature sculpture behind my toenails, like small glass cases and walked away.
Text above © Anna Iltnere | Produced for A La Luz, 2021 | Selected images also © Anna Iltnere, unless otherwise stated
