Performing Soil

We can never know what we will find – when we dig a hole... Earth is a filter, an archive, provides livelihoods, and is an arena for interspecies exchange. Interdependencies, or mutual dependencies, are intrinsic to the earth. Thus Performing Soil is dedicated to those moments of tension in this terrain that arise apart from conventional scientific methods. They assume that projects can be scaled, i.e. that they can function on a small scale as well as on a large one, but they disregard the fact that the actors can change through encounters. The idea to Performing Soil comes from the artists Silke kleine Kalvelage, Jan Georg Glöckner and the curator/cultural mediator Marcel Hörler. Over a period of three months, surrounded by a nature preserve, they collaborated with dancers, artists, craftspeople, and scientists Lisa Lee Benjamin, Marisa Mayer, Xaver Ammann, Kay Zhang, Brigham Baker, New Kyd, Reut Nahum, and Rosa Violetta Zettl to shape a massive globe. The globe was - in the context of the first exhibition at Kunstraum parat - auctioned off and together with three radio shows, the photo documentation and other small-format soil exhibits presented between 9th to 18th of December 2021 to the public.