Given how forests have been a hot topic in Estonia for at least the past few decades – and quite justifiably so – anyone who hasn’t spent at least some time in Järvselja might feel their life is somewhat incomplete. This is primarily due to the primaeval forests around Järvselja, where humans have treaded lightly for over a century, scarcely making a mark on nature’s untamed canvas. The area also boasts record-breaking trees: Estonia’s tallest silver birch, its thickest pine and its tallest alders, both grey and black.

While marvelling at this natural wealth, one might overlook the reason it exists at all: the Järvselja Training and Experimental Forestry District, established in 1921, which has been part of the Estonian University of Life Sciences’ forestry department since the 1950s. This experimental station is also why, this past summer and early autumn, Järvselja attracted not just nature enthusiasts but also those with a keen interest in art. The local library and its adjacent permanent historical exhibition space housed a temporary museum, the Järvselja Study and Experimentation Museum, which, in addition to historical forestry materials, showcased experimental sculptures by Uku Sepsivart.

Sepsivart’s idea, fittingly aligned with the exhibition’s setting and the prevailing green-hued ideology, was to use only natural materials, keeping them as close to their original state as possible. As if that weren’t enough, part of his sculpting process was outsourced to nature itself – to bees, animals, birds and even the weather. Visitors to the museum could see heads made from wasp nests and honeycomb, a boat crafted from beeswax and more. Most of the sculptural heads were self-portraits, though given their round, generic shapes, a strong likeness to the artist was unlikely.

In Neeruti (approximately the same distance from Tartu as Järvselja, but to the south rather than the east), you’ll find the art and tourism farm Maajaam, where, coinciding with the temporary museum at Järvselja, an international open-air exhibition of technological and landscape art, “Wild Bits”, was on display. The exhibition was both high-quality and rich in content. The most striking work for me was Jeanne Harignordoquy’s “World Wind Radio” (2023), a piece that, simply put, transmitted radio signals depending on the direction of the wind. For example, if the wind was blowing from the south, the antenna-mounted device would broadcast signals from a southern transmitter.

Representing traditional, simple, low-tech, idea-driven technological landscape art were works like Julijonas Urbonas’ “Lawn Centrifuge” (2022) and Studio Watershore’s “Transporting Landscape” (2022). The former was a “zero-style” carousel (essentially a slowly rotating large circular piece of sod in the middle of a lawn), while the latter was a long conveyor belt leading from the forest to the field and (despite its somewhat misleading name) transporting branches, cones and other forest debris placed on it by visitors.

An installation featuring long cones attached to blowers, resembling birch trunks, heidundgriess’s “ups and downs” (2022) simulated a birch grove swaying in the wind and then falling over when the blowers switched off. This effect was achieved through the combination of site-specificity (a clearing with a few large birches) and the realistic imitation of birch trunks.

Also worth mentioning were Varvara & Mar’s installation “A Needle in a Haystack” (2023) and the work “Living Water” (2022) by Claudia O’Steen & Aly Ogasian. Based on its title, I expected the first to be simply a haystack where a needle might or might not be hidden. In reality, it was a robot searching through a haystack for a needle that was supposedly there. In “Living Water”, visitors could take a raft to the centre of a nearby pond and measure its depth using simple instruments.

For some reason, acoustic installations, in particular, stood out at this open-air exhibition. Perhaps it is the fact that the landscape and its sounds are ever-present in the outdoors that makes site-specific and interactive or, alternatively, global, aleatoric or automatically generated soundscapes the most unexpected and striking elements in this setting.