Milk & Decay

In Milk and Decay, a slow female voice intones the names of the months, from one July to the next, describing each month in poetic terms, rich with emotion and imagery that alludes to a recent disaster and its fallout: "Gentle hearts hurt the most. Millions of gallons of black gold." The language switches from an assessment of the physical surroundings: "soil that bled", to an analysis of internal states: "The black dot in our soul", setting up a correspondence between human states and the condition of the planet. In Milk and Decay, lungs turn "plastic" as the voiceover lists the names of supermarkets from different countries, read out from shopping bags. But not all is lost. The work names species known for their ability to survive even the most virulent attacks. Such resilient creatures include cockroaches, coyotes, which even "multiply with death", and fungi, which colonise the newly transformed world. Between the hilly and the flat, things might carry on as normal, but by portraying life at the extremes, Rönkkö stages a reckoning with life’s fragility, with the potential of its imminent demise. - Ellen Mara de Wachter