Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth

In Taiga, the Finland-based media artist Leena Lehti crafts a visceral ‘elegy’ to the boreal forests of her region. Created by Lehti without the use of a camera, the piece pairs animations of regional flora and fauna scratched by hand directly onto 16 mm film with imagery of real moss and plants collected from subarctic Finland, where warming temperatures have begun to transform the biome from a taiga into a temperate forest. Hauntingly beautiful, the resulting work forms an unusually direct and visceral commentary on the climate crisis.