On Vallisaari island, just off the coast of Helsinki, three colossal flowers drift upon a quiet pond, their pale green and white petals cupping sprinklings of golden pollen. The blossoms sit on a watery surface that mirrors the surrounding forest, the shifting sky and passing clouds composing a shimmering flourishing ecosystem. In this remote place, where the world’s many current traumas—war, genocide, climate breakdown—feel momentarily distant, the calm beauty of interconnectedness pervades, like a promise.
Yet these are not flowers at all, but glass blown sculptures—part of Zostera Marina’s Song of Increase, a partly site-specific, multimedia installation by Locus, the Norwegian artist duo Thale Blix Fastvold and Tanja Thorjussen. Commissioned for this year’s Helsinki Biennial, the work takes its name from Zostera Marina, or common eelgrass, a crucial marine species of the Baltic Sea now under threat from pollution, coastal development, and the unrelenting pressures of industrial capitalism. Conjuring flourishing futures of eelgrass delivered with occult vibes, the piece aligns with the biennial’s theme of “shelter,” curated by Kati Kivinen of the Helsinki Museum of Art (HAM) and curator and art historian Blanca de la Torre, highlighting spaces of protection and care that center multispecies agency and environmental belonging.
Thale Blix Fastvold & Tanja Thorjussen / LOCUS, Zostera Marina’s Song of Increase, 2025, commissioned by Helsinki Biennial. Photo: HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Maija Toivanen.
Locus’ contribution builds on the artists’ earlier work, particularly their Bee Sanctuary Gardens—a series of public botanical monuments in Oslo. These include a 2018 installation honoring the late 19th- and early 20th-century artist Harriet Backer and a 2019 piece commemorating writer Dagny Juel—two underrecognized Norwegian cultural figures long eclipsed by their male contemporaries. Each garden features bee-friendly flowers, such as Lathyrus odoratus, Nigella damascena, and Centaurea cyanus, arranged in planters atop decorative wooden bases and accompanied by commemorative portraits and poetic texts. In this restorative gesture—interweaving historical redress with ecological care—Locus honors these women through sculptural gardens designed to attract both pollinators, increasingly endangered by climate change, and people, commonly deprived of stories marginalized by dominant narratives. The result is a shared sociobotanical space of reclamation where overlooked lives and threatened species coexist, where new forms of remembrance and renewal can take root.
Bee Sanctuary Garden—Dagny Juels Hage, LOCUS in collaboration with architect Don Lawrence, 2019.
Bee Sanctuary Garden—Dagny Juels Hage, LOCUS in collaboration with architect Don Lawrence, 2019.
In Helsinki, Locus turns their attention to the local marine environment, developing their ecofeminist practice further, particularly along magical lines. At HAM, they expand their biennial contribution with a living tableau: a large aquarium filled with swaying live eelgrass, above which glass-sculpted blossoms in shades of greens, yellows, and milky whites hang upside down, as if yearning to drop their pollen into the water, or inspiring the plants to rise up in amorous rendezvous. These inverted flowers hover inches from the surface, provoking the viewer to imagine a stirring of sexual reproductive desire within the plants, a tantalizing break from the boring inertia of mere cloning to which Baltic eelgrass have resorted out of a survival instinct under ecosystem duress.
A soundscape flows alongside the piece, offering a recorded chant, a poem-spell performing a meditation on futures where eelgrass meadows flourish, waters run clear, and the Baltic Sea blooms again.
We see futures of eelgrass meadows already thriving!
We see futures of healthy waters and rivers
We see a Baltic Sea flourishing and flowering in peaceful abundance
We see you Zostera
Thale Blix Fastvold & Tanja Thorjussen / LOCUS, Zostera Marina’s Song of Increase, 2025, commissioned by Helsinki Biennial. Photo: HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Sonja Hyytiäinen.
With burbling aquatic sounds in the background, Fastvold and Thorjussen’s voices, resonant, slow, and in unison, rise like incantations, as if from some subterranean mystical realm, calling upon Zostera—the artists’ designated goddess of eelgrass, guardian of amphipods, pipefish, and snails, and relative of such supernaturals as Aphrodite, Oshun, and Thalassa, as their spell notes—to hear their song. Their tone and cadence are neither didactic nor documentary, but ritualistic, summoning, a kind of chant forging passage between human and more-than-human worlds.
Hallucinatory and intoxicating, their voices envelop one’s consciousness, reaching a transcendent pitch that cuts through everyday speech, the media banalities, and routinized distractions that otherwise consume life under disaster capitalism.
Eelgrass meadows were declining worldwide
Eutrophication was a major challenge
Driven by various threats,
Industrial capitalism, corporate globalization, violence, and climate breakdown
Oceanic acidification
Waters were warm and sour
On shallow soft sediments of the Baltic Sea,
Caressing the edges of multinational shorelines
Spatiotemporal monitoring programs detected change
Depleted by heatwaves, algae overgrowth, low salinity,
Depressed by wars, conflict, pollution
Shrinking, loss and grief
So the verse unfolds, as invocation and lament, confronting the reality of environmental decline. Seagrass meadows, vital for marine biodiversity and carbon sequestration, have suffered severe losses, over a third of their cover disappearing in some regions. Locus’ research, in collaboration with the conservationist science of the John Nurminen Foundation, reveals how these ecosystems have been scarred by untreated sewage, toxic industrial runoff, and the warming, acidifying waters of climate breakdown. Even histories of military violence—such as Russia’s alleged dumping of radioactive waste in the Gulf of Finland—haunt this underwater terrain.
Deprived of vitality, eelgrass consequently resorts to asexual reproduction, its capacity for flowering and seed dispersal diminished. But here is where Locus intervenes, confronting this ecological grief not with resignation but with a forward-looking erotic alchemy, an ecosexual enchantment meant to help heal seagrass suffering. Their art imagines, and is thereby meant to inspire, a world where eelgrass renews itself, flowering again, swelling with life.
Then change!
Waters are clearing, the sun kindle your seedlings
Protected and cherished
Sprouting, erective, vibrancy
Renewed growth, seeds, flowers, rhizomes, expanding—
You emerge in orgasmic energy
At Vallisaari, this vision takes on theatrical form during Locus’ spellbinding performances, attempting further to conjure desired futures into existence. Clouds of yellow smoke rise from pyrotechnic bursts, mimicking pollen clouds, atmospheres of fertility, within which Fastvold and Thorjussen—dressed in corseted gowns of blue and yellow, faces veiled in vine-patterned textiles—conduct their slow ritual. They pour potions, scatter seeds, and mirror one another’s gestures, conducting a slow and determined drama of cultivation.
The flowers floating on the pond, seen in the distance, glimmer as talismans, emissaries of an imagined Zostera, a deity of fecundity and survival, summoned to heal and multiply. From the doubleness of cloning to the multiplication of unrestrained growth, their poem-spell cuts through spacetimematter, prefiguring libidinous ecosexual mutations and spawning metamorphic entanglements through magical alchemy and botanical becoming.1 This is no promise for a time deferred; it is rather an act to summon a new now, bridging present reality and a thriving world-to-come.
To adapt during climate change, is yours, Zostera
To purge deleterious mutations and form new genotypes by recombinations, is yours, Zostera
Limnic flowering, is yours, Zostera
Thale Blix Fastvold & Tanja Thorjussen / LOCUS, Zostera Marina’s Song of Increase, 2025, commissioned by Helsinki Biennial.
Centering Zostera, Locus’s work—grounded in mythopoesis, ecosexual feminism, quantum worldbuilding, multispecies ethnography, and their own form of neopagan magic—may initially appear to transport us into fantasy beyond the bounds of reality. Yet it pointedly resists the escapism sometimes linked to anti-anthropocentric art practices that overcorrect toward the more-than-human. Such trends risk severing critical ties to the all-too-human genealogies of racial capitalism, colonial extraction, and environmental violence that shape the very landscapes they seek to re-enchant. Similarly, this is no anti-modern neo-primitivism: Locus’ magic, conversely, is of a scientifically-informed ecosocialism totally opposed to any neofascist ethnonationalism or organic purity politics—its ecology rather locates becoming as the truth of being and diversity as the culture of multispecies, polygendered society (Beyond male and female, you are abundance and nurture in grasslike form).
Rather than retreating into a depoliticized space-time scrubbed of human presence, Locus’s presentation reflects a nuanced understanding of knotted natureculture webs, where the flourishing of more-than-human life is inseparable from the urgent need to dismantle the very systems that endanger it. Their project offers no naïve gesture toward blind optimism, yet equally resists the lure of cosmic pessimism or ontological nihilism—all temptations these days symptomatizing a world in profound social and environmental crisis and planetary sadness.2
What Locus’ critical optimism provides, as manifested through their performance of a knowing worldmaking desire, is an invitation to become aware of the very mystifying aura surrounding our dominant political and economic order—an arrangement that imagines itself as rational and scientific while in truth relying on what Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre have called “capitalist sorcery.”3 With its seductive yet disorienting logic, the “magic of the market” masks its true allegiance to the relentless accumulation of wealth through a fossil-fueled militarized machinery that destroys the world it claims to sustain. Its form of enchantment threatens to capture our very capacity to think and feel, making the violence of the market appear natural, inevitable, and beyond question—and with the unleashing of mystifying AI and the new intensities of algorithmic automation, thoughtlessness has only grown in magnitude in the fifteen or so years since their book was published.
Working out of a witchy lineage long dedicated to the undoing of imperialism and state violence, Locus’ spell-work, by contrast, names this sorcery for what it is—deathly, futureless, unjust—and in response deploys a kind of apotropaic countermagic of resistance in imagining other worlds-to-come.4 Remarkably, the project has already produced tangible consequences, and in the realm of natural sciences no less. As the artists discovered, their John Nurminen Foundation collaboration has sparked new lines of research aimed at finding blossoming Baltic eelgrass once believed not to exist, their art helping to disrupt the prevailing institutional pessimism that has fixated solely on environmental decline and degradation.5 It turns out art can bring about a perception shift—a science of flowers—that enables new realities to emerge that were previously unseen. Art thereby avoids the doom spiral of “the perpetuation of the anti-politics of the probable, against the political creation of the possible.”6
Locus performs this operation by crafting prefigurative “refrains,” in Pignarre and Stengers’ terms, motives of prophecy and practice that interrupt prevailing narratives. Whether articulated in the incantatory repetitions of their poem-spells or expressed through the aesthetic play of visual doublings and generative multiplicities, these politico-aesthetic refrains open fissures through which alternative futures can emerge. Through its animistic recognition of interconnectedness, Zostera Marina’s Song of Increase enacts a radical ecology of desire, one that defies the isolating, ecocidal logic of capitalism and instead cultivates a multispecies agency that celebrates the life-giving entanglement of all beings.
NOTES
* Many thanks to the ArtMill Center For Regenerative Arts, in the Czech Republic, and to its director Gabriela Benish-Kalná, for a summer 2025 residency, where this essay was written.
Video excerpt from Making of Zostera Marina's Song of Increase / link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2g1Jv7hTqM / credits: LOCUS / Thale Blix Fastvold and Tanja Thorjussen / HAM Helsinki Art Museum and The John Nurminen Foundation.
