There is no place like home

Performance on 10.04.2024, 18-18:30 and 20-20:30.

Together with BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES, the Philara Collection is pleased to present the comprehensive group exhibition Speaking Soil. Twelve international artists from China, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Romania and Singapore, among others, negotiate aspects of soil as a resource, habitat and territory as well as related rhetorics around ownership, resettlement, migration and climate change.

In 11 chapters, Speaking Soil uses different artistic perspectives to explore aspects of soil and its relevance for all forms of life. The starting point for this exploration is the large-scale excursion program “Art and Soil”, in which the artists took part as fellows of the art residency network BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES. They were invited to devote themselves to artistic research on the soil in the border region between Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. On biodynamic farms near Kranenburg and Nijmegen, they worked with farmers and scientists to find new parameters for determining soil value beyond economic factors or biochemical indicators. Further excursions took the participants to active and renaturalized gravel works in the district of Wesel and to the edge of the Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine.

The works in the exhibition address a wide variety of narratives and discourses on the rich resource of the earth in an exemplary and non-exhaustive manner. For example, they show moors and bog bodies as a place of connection between the future and the past, examine national borders from a migrant perspective and renegotiate hierarchies of nature and man from an eco-feminist point of view. In doing so, the artists create multi-layered levels of observation for a socio-political examination of territories, resettlement and uprooting, which extends to the question of whether images can themselves provide nutrients as “living soil”.

Participating artists: 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

Links:

• Sammlung Philara “Speaking Soil” exhibition page

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