Speaking Soil

Tini Aliman, Wim Bosch, Cristiana Cott Negoescu, David Hahlbrock, Salomé Ingelbrecht, Zhixin Angus Liao, Darcy Neven, Nico Pachali, Silke Schatz, Rosa Vrij, Finn Wagner, Marit Westerhuis

The Philara Collection, in cooperation with BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES is pleased to present Speaking Soil, an extensive group exhibition. Twelve international artists from Belgium, China, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Romania, and Singapore, among others, examine aspects of soil as a resource, habitat, and territory, as well as related rhetoric around ownership, resettlement, migration, and climate change.

In 11 chapters, Speaking Soil takes a range of artistic approaches to explore various aspects of the soil and its relevance to all life forms. The impetus for this exploration was provided by 'Art and Soil’, a wide-ranging excursion programme, in which artists awarded residencies by the BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES network participated. They were invited to engage in artistic research on the ground in in the borderlands between Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. While visiting biodynamic agricultural enterprises near Kranenburg and Nijmegen, the artists, together with farmers and scientists, investigated new parameters, extending beyond economic factors or biochemical indicators, for determining the value of land. On other field trips, the participants visited the rim of the Garzweiler opencast brown coal mine and active and renaturalised areas at gravel extraction sites in the district of Wesel.

The works in the exhibition take an exemplary rather than exhaustive approach to address a wide variety of discourses surrounding the narratives of this rich resource. They show bogs and bog bodies as points of interconnection between past and future, investigate national borders from a migration point of view, or renegotiate human-nature hierarchies from an ecofeminist perspective. The artists thus create a multilayered approach to socio-political debate on territories, uprooting and resettlement, extending to the question of whether images themselves can be 'living soil' providing nutrients. There is a particular focus on linguistic expression. The multilingual spectrum of meaning in terms such as soil, Mutterboden(German for native soil), and țară mamă (Romanian for motherland) to 土 (Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese for earth or soil) opens up new reflective spaces shaped by the diversity of experience and international origins of the artists. Poetic, graphic and sound-performative explorations of soil create a polyglot space in which plants become active co-creators of sound installations.

On the way to a more sustainable future and a more respectful treatment of soil and earth, the artists also look for poetic ways to arouse and foster our curiosity for geopolitical issues, to confront the problems of both local and global environments, to ‘stay with the trouble’[1] without becoming powerless.

The exhibition brings together video works, photograms, photographs, drawings, sculptures, installations, sound, and poetry and is complemented by several performances, workshops, and performative dinners.

Exhibition curators: Julika Bosch, Hannah Niemeier

Curatorial assistant: Dana M. A. Bulic

Borderland Residencies project sponsor: Kulturraum Niederrhein e.V.; Maike Beier and Ingrid Misterek-Plagge

[1] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.

BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES is a project of the Kulturraum Niederrhein e.V., implemented in conjunction with Odapark center for contemporary art, and with the collaboration of the residency hosts.

The SPEAKING SOIL exhibition and BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES are supported by the Ministry for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of the Regional Culture Programme NRW, the Mondriaan Fund of the Netherlands, and INTERREG Germany-Netherlands, (co)financed by the European Union.

www.kulturraum-niederrhein.de

www.borderland-residencies.eu

Instagram: @borderland_residencies

Supported by the Ministry for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia