Listening to the Earth Beyond Silence

The exhibition in the Vintti exhibition space sees the human relationship with the land as a fundamental part of humanity, but also as an object of abuse and destruction. It is linked to colonialism, capitalist hierarchies, intersections of class, race and gender. The works in this exhibition are part of a collective, experimental research that seeks to recover something original, indigenous. Seeds and soil are seen as carriers of memory, deep time and situated knowledges. The route figuratively traced in the exhibition symbolises the passage of seeds and food across Eastern Europe and the Global South along colonial and imperialist routes.

The exhibition includes individual works, artistic experiments and projects, as well as various artist-led communities and artistic manifestations of community action. The exhibition is a meeting place for different perspectives: artists working as community builders and artists working with the land, imaginators of hope.

ARTISTS AND ARTIST COLLECTIVES

The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life is a collective project initiated in 2021 by a group of artists, curators, theorists, economists and others, who, together with tranzit.ro Association, are the stewards of a plot of land in the village Silistea Snagovului, 40 km north of Bucharest, in the proximity of a protected natural area (forest and lake). Situated in a long-duration perspective and throughout a participatory, open process of building and contextualizing, the Station is a prototype for a cultural institution grounded in its specific locality, yet open for alliances with other life-cultivating communities; it is situated in a post-development narrative and based on ecological and ethical principles.

Anang Saptoto is an artist, designer, and activist living in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, with a background in media arts and visual communication design. His practice focuses on ecology and social change, using art as a tool to question and open new possibilities through interaction, collaboration and building solidarity. He often supports environmental, human rights movements and collaborates with children, schools, disabled communities, and social organizations. In 2020 he founded PARI (Panen apa hari ini) with support from the UN-Habitat, initially as a response to food distribution alternatives during the pandemic. PARI is a platform connecting art practices with farming in which every activity is developed in cooperation with artists, art students, food producers, farming enthusiasts, or anyone interested in food sovereignty and communal resolutions. In 2021 he was one of the SEEDS Awards recipients from The Prince Claus Fund.

Valiana Aguilar is a founding member of the collective Suumil Mooktaan, Sinanche, Yucatan. They are a collective of young people from a generation that is returning to the land. The inability to live from the milpa and artisanal fishing, due to soil degradation brought upon by the invasion of monocultures, agrochemicals, and changes in climate conditions, led to the displacement of several generations to the cities and tourist hubs in search of a livelihood for their families. They are coming back to reconnect with their Mayan ways of building, cultivating the milpa, and taking care of native seeds and bees, in order to reinvent together their own way of inhabiting the territory.

Weaving Realities is an artist collective that organizes public performances and workshops by practicing sentipensar – thinking through feeling with the territory, and by weaving with pluriversal knowledges to change our position from the “I” to the “we” together with the living Earth. Their work intends to interweave different alternative ways of relating to the world other than exploitation, appropriation or consumption, by using art as a platform. Our relation to mother Earth is reflected profoundly in our relation with food. The collective uses the kitchen as a space to question and rethink our relationship with the entire food production chain, from the land, the producers to our dinner table. Cooking then becomes a form of resistance in revival of ancestral knowledges, while being conscious about our own relations to the life of others. The collective consists of Yuchen Li and Aldo Esparza Ramos.

CURATORS

The Resurrection Committee was founded in 2016 by Ovidiu Țichindeleanu and Raluca Voinea, as a fluid curatorial collective aimed at curating research exhibitions and projects that are offering historical apertures from which to construct other narratives than the dominant ones of the moment. Exhibitions and interventions: The Veil of Peace, tranzit.ro/ Bucharest, 2017, co-curated with Igor Mocanu; After the Canal There Was Only “Our” World, Mestna Galerija Ljubljana, 2019, with inputs from Alenka Gregoric; Remembering Peace, contribution to Kyiv Biennial, Vienna, 2023, co-curated with Livia Pancu; Vegetative Histories, a walk at the Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna, 2024, with Adelina Luft and Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan.