Output: Edgeland (2024) Artists Film

https://vimeo.com/robynwoolston/edgeland

An eco-poetic film situated on the tidal and urban threshold of the Baltic coastline.

Rhythmic and relational in tone, the work traces migratory histories across the Gulf of Gdansk, whilst simultaneously drawing upon the socio-political legacy of Solidarność (or Solidarity) and the enduring symbolic presence of Lech Wałęsa.

Set within the tri-city region of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot, the film attends to a coastal landscape increasingly shaped by climate instability. As Scott Kulp notes (quoted in Ludwika Tomala’s ‘Poland's beaches are threatened by global warming’) rising waters threaten to transform “cities, economies, coastlines and entire global regions, within our lifetimes.”

Developed over a month-long period through the TTT collaborative partnership, this work approaches water not simply as a material resource or environmental system, but as an affective and political medium through which human, more-than-human, and emotional relations to place are negotiated. Within an age of solastalgia, water becomes both archive and agent: carrying traces of ecological transformation while actively reshaping the landscapes, memories, and attachments through which place is understood. Flooding and salinisation unsettle inherited notions of permanence, belonging, and place attachment, revealing these relationships as contingent, porous, and vulnerable to environmental change. In this context, ecological disruption is not only registered through altered landscapes, but is also felt in the body, carried through memory, and negotiated collectively. Water thus opens a space for asking how changing ecologies are sensed, remembered, mourned, and ultimately re-imagined—inviting attention to the aesthetic and political dimensions of living with, and within, an increasingly unstable hydrological world.