#50: View inside Insideview (with Aga Bułacik, Vaim Sarv, and Ola Zielińska)

There’s a phenomenon experienced by people who have seen the Earth from outer space. It is known as the “Overview Effect”: a new level of compassion and understanding of how fragile and interconnected life is. What could bring us closer to the Overview Effect without leaving Earth? How can we embody what is hard to grasp, relate to, and integrate into a conscious interconnectedness beyond intellectual understanding? What if, instead of looking from far away, as in the Overview Effect, we looked into ourselves from a microscopic close-up? Could we get closer to a sense of expanded consciousness within the Earth’s ecosystem and beyond our simplified identities?These are the questions that led me to develop the project “Insideview”, an audio-visual ritual to compost human exceptionalism, performed in January 2025, at Helsinki’s SOLU space. Together with an amazing team that included Aga Bułacik, Vaim Sarv, and Ola Zielińska, we intertwined folk songs, ferments, words, and holographic projections of the human microbiome to set on a dreamy journey to re-imagine our relationship with the living world, both within and around us. Drawing inspiration from death doulas who use songs to create safe spaces for letting go, we hummed along to hospice human exceptionalism and confront our fears of insignificance.