Terms: 

A map — a simplification of the landscape. A cartographer is reproducing simplified version of reality, cleansing the «noise» and showing what seems relevant; that reproduction will be limited by the method; but, even considering the method, a map is always one’s interpretation. 

A landscape — a uniform unit of the environment; a landscape is a complex system that include all living and non-living beings within one unified space; all parts of it exist in constant exchange and connection. A landscape — the smallest part of biosphere. A landscape — the one you miss when you far from home.

Biosphere — a sphere that consists of everything alive and its habitats. Biosphere is a layer covering most of the planet; this imaginary sphere where all ecosystems are interconnected by transition of energy and matter. In a way, Biosphere unites you with any place on the planet, like your birth town.

Migration — movement in space forced by certain factors. There is constant migration in natural systems; part of interconnectedness of biosphere based on the process of migration of: energy, matter, species. Arctic tern, a Nordic seabird, migrates from Arctic to Antarctic and back during a year. Migration is an energetically difficult process.

Invasive species — species that don’t belong to the local environment; they were brought there by chance; invasive species have to face a complicated process of adaptation.

Adaptation — a process that migrating species have to go through; the process of getting used to new environment; adaptation can take significant time depends on each species.

Materials and methods:

Here we have an experiment, where you can observe the scientist that is studying surrounding ecosystem by using a familiar language — a map. But, there is no traditional scientific method, there are only scientific intuition and nostalgia. This time the scientist become an object of study: except of species and ecosystem, here we are inviting you to study an immigrant and its asylum. The only scientific instrument is being used is transparent paper, a filter to perceive and capture reality in a familiar way for the scientist. There are no traditional scientific methods being used, a scientist is no longer the subject that study the object; here we have another kind of object — which is the result of existing in scientific environment, the result of scientific way of thinking — myself. During these years in the science I have learned to observe, notice, analyse, classify. Therefore, in a parallel with adapting to scientific methodology, I grew a scientific intuition. And here is the experiment: if we will take the scientific method from the scientist, there will be intuition left; if we will take the motherland from the immigrant, there will be nostalgia. Here you can see — the invasive species, not typical for the local ecosystem, and its way of perceiving the world through that transparent paper, which was created before, in the native ecosystem. In that experiment we call it «a phantom map of the motherland».