«kuker/site» is an installation made with old fresnel lenses from used TVs from the 1990s– which are arranged into a somewhat screen-based media installation. «kuker/site» functions without the common technologies and energy transmissions – rather, it’s a relict of them.

The lenses, through two- and three-channel setups, distort their immediate surroundings in a way that might appear digital to us, disturbed like pixels with a glitch. At the same time they idiosyncratically augment the non-human entities behind them. The work is based on (field) on-site research, into the mining industry and kukersite oil shale industry and the geological history of Estonia. Displaced behind some of the lenses are deep geological layers from Estonia’s unique klint coastline: kukersite oil shale stones from the Ordovician age, originating from a mine in the north and artificial appearing blue clay from the Cambrian age, one of the oldest Earth layers (~540–420 Ma) – and also mined for various products. The displaced kukersite stones contain visible fossils and are marked with heat engravings from sunlight focused through the lenses.

«kuker/site» engages in estonian north-south geographies and its deep (human) geologies to approach on interlocal dependencies and the creeping uncanniness of changing socio-ecologies: the seemingly untouched, ‹sublime› nature in the south of Estonia (Maajaam/Neeruti) where «kuker/site» is installed, is set in tension to hyperlocal, often publicly inaccessible mining sites in the north. «kuker/site» explores augmented layers between the human and non-human, playing with the boundaries between the artificial and non-artificial, between ‹nature›, body and technology.

The installation was developed at Maajaam within the framework of Wild Bits which is in the main programme of the European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024.