In most of our lives, the milk we once knew followed an exceedingly short trajectory. We just needed to open our throats and the dripping nipple was propped into our still toothless mouths. Regardless of whether we were boys or girls, the satisfaction was so complete that we will never entirely be free of the notion that the world revolves around a woman’s breast.

But things could not remain as they were, and it was not long before our mothers began to push us away with a gentle but determined hand. This was our first move in the direction of the wider world. For the provision of our milk, we became dependent on animals, and with this, for a time, we completely lost sight of its path.

Later, at school, with the help of posters on the wall, it was explained to us what that path more or less looked like. First, the milk magically emerged as the farmer milked his cow, then it followed the arrows in the pictures to arrive at the factory. There it moved further along other arrows, through tanks and machines, to be creamed off, churned, homogenized, pasteurized and so on. Finally, it flowed out in litre bottles with silver caps, which were in turn put into metal crates and onto trucks, to be driven to the local milkman. He was the hero of the final picture. He personally delivered the milk to an ideally healthy family, all of whom preferably stood waiting for him at their own front door.

It seemed to us then that this was a lengthy series of events, but from today’s perspective, the path sketched by those pictures at school was one of endearing simplicity. You could still be certain that the cow whose milk you drank grazed close to your own city or town, and that the factory was not much farther away. Everything was within reach, within a circle of at most a few dozen kilometres. Yet with the march of history and a swelling economy, those few dozen kilometres have become hundreds and even thousands. The path of that milk has grown so long that it no longer fits on the posters at school, since banished from the classroom forever.

But take a look: Art has decided to involve herself with the path of milk. It may be surprising, but is not strange, given that art lives by the expansion of her sphere of influence, perpetually renewing her perspective. Once, art introduced a new vision of landscape through the act of painting it, or in other words, seeing it through the frame of a painting, which was then new. Since then and precisely because of its success, what was an innovation in its day has now grown hunched and bent, burdened under a mountain of clichés.

In collaboration with researcher Ieva Auzina, this is reason enough for artist Esther Polak to step in, to use milk instead of paint. By charting the path of milk, they once again depict landscape in a new way, entirely different from that of paintings in centuries past. In a painting, the course of a road and the movements of its travellers were determined by the artist. In MILK, those who use the road mark it out themselves. These are the people who collect the milk and the drivers of the tanker trucks that transport it. With a turn of the steering wheel, they determine whether the art observer sees the path bend to the left or to the right. What has for years been their anonymous labour suddenly becomes a worldly affair, their routine actions grown profound and the product they transport assuming the weight of liquid gold. Each step they take is observed from the heavens, by satellite, recorded onto a hard drive and projected onto screens and monitors all over the world.

The nice thing is that the technological developments that had for so long made the path of milk so impossible to follow also provide the means to make it traceable and appealing again. In the form of the Global Positioning System, it serves a pivotal function in the MILK project. This can also be seen in two ways, either as a symbol of a Big Brother society and total political control, or as a system that can bring personal control back to those who have come to miss it.

And there can be no doubt that a great many have indeed come to miss that sense of control. The problem is not that the control exists, but that we ourselves cannot exercise it. In order to change this, we have to want to know, for knowledge remains the key to power – knowledge of the world, which is perpetually changing, and always with far-reaching consequences.

When the production line for foodstuffs became longer, it immediately also meant a parallel production line of preservatives, anti-oxi­dan­ts and emulsifiers. Whether we see all that as dangerous or perfectly innocent, we have to want to know about it, for as the philosophers would say, man is what he eats. Esther Polak expresses it rather more imaginatively: ‘Eating meat cheaper by the kilo helps build a landscape full of hog farms.’

Making connections like these, between the individual and society as a whole, is characteristic of her work. She carries out research that lies partly in the domain of scientists, journalists and lawyers, but they would never conduct it or give it shape in quite the same way. Her investigation is considerably freer, for it is not bound by preconceived rules. Here she is both ahead of and behind the rule-bound researchers. She can be at once more naïve and wiser, but she is certainly no less effective.

In Esther Polak, we recognize the old cartographer who in the 17th century, in the time of Willem III, counted his own paces along the streets with a chain between his legs to keep his steps consistent. We also recognize her fellow artist Stanley Brouwn, who in the 1960s and 1970s built up a gigantic administrative archive with notes about his own footsteps. Thanks to her intensive collaboration with Ieva Auzina and the Riga Centre for New Media Culture, or RIXC, MILK has been able to expand on the work of those pioneers.

What MILK sets into motion is not only that we begin to think about the path that milk travels between Latvia and the Netherlands, but that, en passant, we also think, about the whole trajectory that we each tread, as children of mankind, starting with our mother’s breast.