Currently packing to catch an early flight to Kaunas. Next week I’ll open an exhibition “Earth as a Body” (LT version “Žemės kūnas”) that I am both curating and participating in. I have an immense pleasure to share space with wonderful Ukrainian artist: Daryna Mamaisur, Teta Tsybulnyk and Elias Parvulesco (ruins.today) in the cosiest of all – Meno Parkas gallery.

The exhibition is happening because of the encounters I had with Daryna and Teta during, for the first time, Docudays festival in Kyiv, in 2023, and dialogues that developped following those encounters. Urged by Ihor Babaiev, my friend and collaborator, I looked at their work, read what they write, and thought how beautiful and sad, and how I, in some ways, recognise myself in their work, and how the landscapes we look at and grief for, meet.

The text I wrote about the expo starts like this:

The works constituting the Earth as a Body exhibition turn the gaze towards scarred landscapes. 

The scarring results from long practices of mining the earth’s resources for the thickened matter of lives past.

For a long time, mining and extractivism were referred to only in terms of practices connected to excavating the visible landscape and that which lies beneath it. However, extractivist practices are also ways of thinking in which the lifeworlds and bodies of others are treated as unimportant, in which everyone, human and nonhuman alike, and everything is expendable.

Extractive practices expand through time and space, disrupting fundamental entanglements. Once ruptured, mined, and undone, these entanglements – complex webs of inter-dependencies – will never return to the anterior state. Therefore, as time goes on, while the depths of the pits fill in with water to become acid lakes, while the forests cover mined and shelled horizons, while the grass takes over the depleted mires, underneath, the scar tissue remains, counting time from the rupture, remembering. 

In much the same way, extractivist – to be equated to imperial, colonial – practices undermine the social fabric, cut into and disintegrate webs of relationships between humans, nonhumans, places, and times, destroy the inter-generational continuity, steal the memory, and leave biological, social and cultural scarred.

Side note 1: While I am writing this, I am thinking about the construction of the image and text, of poetry writing and singing as forms of resistance agains the unimaginable, horrible and atrocious. Creative acts to counter the destruction.

Side note 2: Daryna’s Mamaisur a steppe with rabbits and pheasants running around, and where some even saw foxes is both a film and a steppe archive, go look here.

Side note 3: Teta Tsybulnyk is an artist and a psychotherapist, and from this position in-between she wrote a text about the unconscious of the landscape, with the reference to the films that the exhibition will show, go read here.