This project is presented by Josilda da Conceição gallery (Amsterdam)
The soil in this complex installation was brought in from the Belarusian village “Zhirovichi”, the village of the artist’s grandparents. It was collected near the Spring of holy water.
Around the spring the lush vegetation creates a place of tranquility, a place where the biblical myths breathe through the matter of the landscape.
The “pochva” is alive, it houses billions of living beings -traces of the distant landscape. The organisms in the soil are breathing, feeding, metabolizing. Their vitality produces an electrical charge.
“Since the Russian invasion into Ukraine I have not been able to return to Belarus. The village of my grandparents, along with it’s Holy Spring are now only a memory. The memory - shared like a collective hallucination of a promised land. A land, existing on a different scale of time, eternally near and distant.”
“Pochva” is an installation in which the electrical signals produced by microorganisms are shaping the reconstructed “Memory Landscape” in real-time.
It starts with the soil brought from the artist’s grandparent’s village and the soils sensor that the artist developed together with Annemerel Mol and David Striks of Wageningen University. Microorganisms in the soil produce electrical charge, the “movements” of that charge are mesaured in real-time. The signal measured in the soil is changing several parameters in the digital landscape (created in Unity and developed by Ilya Doreanu).
The rendered landscape is modelled on images from the artist’s memory of the Belarusian landscape. The signal from the soil sensor affects the vegetation growth, sunlight and the rain. As such both the artist’s memory and the soil draw the landscape with light on the screen.