Nastja Säde Rönkkö

Following the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, Shia LaBeouf and his artist friends launched a live stream art project called 'HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US' that ran for four years, the duration of Trump's presidential term. But what began as a spirited display of resistance against the divisive presidential election result quickly devolved into an internet meme. The live stream attracted attention from the darkest corners of 4CHAN, encouraging trolls who made it their life's mission to ruin Shia's art project.

Those Who Kept the Light is a project loosely based on stories of female lighthouse keepers in Scandinavia. The project explores our co-dependent relationship to the sea in context of queer and feminist maritime narratives. The narratives are often told through the voices and context of more-than human others, such as the wind, a prawn or a lighthouse. The sea, the wind, the ocean are seen as entities with consciousness and a voice. Within the wider framework of climate emergency and the role of the fragile ecosystems of the ocean, the project explores the collective mind-set of imagination, hope and imagined spaces of solace and power through and within epic and barren Nordic landscape.

ICELAND (Nighttime) explores the collective mindset of anxiety and hope in epic, post-catastrophic landscapes. The video engages the most fundamental of human experiences: love, hope, fear, solitude and togetherness. Set in Icelandic landscapes that are romantic yet inhospitable, ICELAND (Nighttime) deals with the sensibility that we are close to the end of the world as we know it.

The video resembles a nursery rhyme about different months, but within the poetic lines looms allusions to a planetary catastrophe. In a transformed world, resilient creatures like cockroaches, coyotes, and fungi are ready to take the stage.

A narrator from an undefined future discusses love, hope, future, beginnings, myths, environmental disasters and vanished species. The video investigates the possible end of an era, its entangled histories, open-ended narratives and flux identities. It aims to carefully glimpse into the possible futures of humankind and other kind: the vital necessity for co-dependence and urgency to remember, preserve and act now.

LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner embark on a month-long project to hitchhike the internet, posting their coordinates online each day and waiting for a ride, with their path entirely in the hands of the public.