ABSTRACT
In the winter of 2012 the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila brought a life-size spruce tree into Moderna museet in Stockholm in the form of the film installation Horizontal. Horizontal helps visualize the triangular relationship between the human eye, technology, and nature. In this case, the human senses are extended through camera technology to observe what we cannot see merely with our eyes, like the top of a tree. On the one hand, what Ahtila seems to ask through Horizontal is whether we can shift our understanding of the world to be less human-orientated by encountering a tree on its own terms. Horizontal both references and questions art historical terms and genres that are so established they have become normalized. With Horizontal the focus has changed from humans to what surrounds humans, a gesture that can be understood to express a wider concern about climate change: we need to think about something else than our human selves.
