Bladderwrack returns to the Baltic

Liliana Zeic’s series “Bladderwrack returns to the Baltic” is a multi-layered narrative about an ecosystem whose disappearance is reshaping the landscape of the Baltic Sea. The artist employs her own developed intarsia technique, and the works are accompanied by texts documenting an interdisciplinary research process – combining artistic practice, field observation, the history of the natural environment, and reflection on the possibilities of ecosystem reconstruction.

The starting point for the series is bladderwrack (Fucus vesiculosus) – a brown algae that, until the second half of the 20th century, helped shape the underwater landscape of the Polish coast. Together with other plant and algae species, it formed complex habitats that provided the basis for the life of many marine organisms. The disappearance of bladderwrack in the 1970s was the result of a complex interplay of political, economic and technological processes: post-war industrialisation, a sharp rise in water pollution, and the exploitation of marine resources based on flawed ecological assessments. As individual species disappeared, the entire ecosystem collapsed.

The exhibition does not merely reconstruct a history of loss. Its central focus is the moment of encounter – a confrontation with a living ecosystem, existing elsewhere, which reveals the scale of local absence. This perspective shifts the narrative from nostalgia towards a reflection on the possibility of return: biological, symbolic and imaginative. In Zeic’s works, bladderwrack functions as a liminal organism – between rootedness and drifting, memory and regeneration, disappearance and persistence in hidden or potential forms.

The artist’s intarsia technique becomes here a medium analogous to ecological processes. Forms created from various species of wood merge into new structures resembling underwater communities of organisms. Each work is constructed through layering, cutting, fitting and reconfiguration – gestures corresponding both to research work and to the natural processes of growth, decay and biological succession. Intarsia becomes a tool for thinking about the ecosystem as a relational system.

The texts accompanying the works do not serve an explanatory function, but document the path of discovery: the analysis of scientific archives, conversations with researchers, and the development of methods for underwater documentation. The exhibition is situated between a laboratory and a space of memory – it reveals the process, not the result.
A key theme of the project is the question of the limits of human intervention. The history of failed attempts to restore bladderwrack indicates that the restoration of ecosystems does not always rely on active intervention, but sometimes on refraining from interference. In this sense, the return of kelp remains possible, yet uncontrollable – dependent on long-term environmental processes. 

“Bladderwrack returns to the Baltic” is an exhibition about visibility and invisibility: about a landscape that exists more through ecological memory than as a visual image. Zeic’s works offer a perspective on the sea that is not merely a backdrop to human activity, but an autonomous system capable of both collapse and regeneration. The return of the bladderwack becomes a symbol of hope here – not spectacular, but slow, organic and requiring mindfulness.

text: Antonina Marat