A Conversation with Terike Haapoja

JUST ART: How did you come to work on these subjects and themes, of animals and natureculture and mortality?

Terike Haapoja: I grew up in the countryside where I was completely immersed in a natural environment that was inhabited by all kinds of species. When I started to work with art I always had an issue with visual representations as two dimensional images, because I felt that a kind of spatial material connectedness to my surroundings was far more accurate a reflection of how I actually experienced reality. At some point I then discovered imaging technologies such as the infrared camera, and that was the first media that I somehow got, because it reveals its quality as a mediator. You can’t look through it; instead you face a very material surface that’s translating the reality outside your senses. So the question of how we know the world through these sensory interfaces was already there. Entropy was the first video work I made with this technology. I still feel it’s really important to me. 

JA: I was looking back through your work and reading this beautiful book, which is actually a long conversation between Donna Haraway and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. In it Donna Haraway says: “From my point of view the affirmation of dying seems absolutely fundamental. Affirmation not in the sense of glorifying death, but in the sense—to put it bluntly—that without mortality we’re nothing. In other words the fantasy of transcending death is opposed to everything I care about.” And I think that this really resonates with your work, especially with your earlier work including Entropy, The Present, Community and Inhale—Exhale as well as the fetus images in Mind Over Matter Over Mind. 

TH: The shooting of those pieces has always been like wakes beside the bodies I’m with. It was important for me to repeat that process in the work. I think that a very core function of art is to provide interfaces through which we can be in relation to that which we cannot understand. In that sense it has to do with spirituality. I’m not religious, but I think these metaphors or these symbolic spaces allow us to form a relation to something we cannot ever rationally or cognitively understand—things such as the disappearance of subjectivity, which we can never really experience. 

JA: It is hard not to see these works without thinking of the ongoing massive extinctions of plants, animals and human entangled ways of life. The extinction of a species is often visualized not as the death of a particular individual, but as the disappearance of a mass, a genus. And what I like about your approach to this topic is the way you’re asking the viewer to be witness to the death of a particular creature.

TH: I think forming emotional connection is necessary—I don’t know if you can say it’s necessary in order to evoke action. It’s not action that I try to evoke with my work directly, especially not with these works, but rather some kind of emotional connection that’s related to one’s own body and one’s own life experience as a being. It’s not anthropomorphization, it’s more a realization of the fact that we are bodily and that is what we share.

JA: The way that you approach these questions of mortality and the limits of knowledge, and the cyclical nature of time are infused with a lot of ethics, and Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking in particular. You even cite him when you say, in relation to The Presence: “The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas describes the inner sense of time as a foundation of an ethical encounter. The other is not merely an object in my time, she or he also has a past and a future that are not accessible to me.” The passage from life to death in a lot of ways is the passage from being in time to no longer being in time, to not being bound by the passage of time.

TH: His ideas have been important, especially exactly those parts of his thinking about time. Another book that affected me a lot back when I started my studies was Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. It’s kind of an art school cliché. But it contains the kind of analysis of a medium that is about our existential being in the world that I felt I could relate to as an artist. He doesn’t just provide a semiotic theory, but opens up this space where it becomes visible how meanings are bound to our emotional, human existence in the world. Through my early experiences of nature I’ve gained a very strong sense that this kind of being in the world is something that exists for all life forms, not just for humans.

Interview conducted with Terike Haapoja on 21 May 2026. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.