Listening to the Earth Beyond Silence
10.5.2025 - 9.8.2025
Kunsthalle Seinäjoki, Art and Culture Centre Kalevan Navetta, Nyykoolinkatu 25, Seinäjoki, Finland
An exhibition curated by The Resurrection Committee: Adelina Luft, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Raluca Voinea
With contributions from:
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life & Adelina Ivan, Darya Tsymbalyuk, Eduard Constantin, Jaana Kokko, V. Leac, Vlad Basalici
Collectivo Suumil Móokt’aan & Valiana Aguilar
Weaving Realities & Aldo Esparza Ramos, Yuchen Li
PARI (Panen Apa Hari Ini) & Anang Saptoto
Ingenious trackers overcame the limits of what can be seen by putting their ears to the ground in order to listen to the movement of horses or of a herd of animals coming from a distance. The Earth, large and all-welcoming, holds the weight of all our movements, across seas and continents. Can we learn though to listen to each other? Do we still have time – and do we give ourselves the time to listen beyond silence?
We are living in a world of incessant noise, not in a world of conversations across differences. As Rolando Vazquez reminded us, fossil technologies and mining industries are consuming in the background the ancestrality of the Earth, cramming it all in the Now-time of modernity. Foregrounded discussions are rarely breaking the superficial clamor of the news cycle. The noise of modernity is silencing the movements that are reclaiming a long past and a living relation to the land. And yet there is movement, and we are here because we know it.
Four different collectives that are re-learning to listen to the Earth beyond silence are bringing here signs from the lands of China, Indonesia, Netherlands, Romania, and Yucatan, among others.
Our proposal is part of an ongoing process of grounding thought in the Eastern European space against the forces of the ongoing war on life. We are cultivating trans-generational and trans-geographical histories and knowledges, re-purposing artistic work and tools in relation to the land, and making visible expressions and practices oriented towards joy and care, and adapted to the scale of our possibilities. We position our collective findings as an ongoing and experimental research at re-indigenizing our soils and ourselves in reciprocity; thinking through the invisible connections of seeds and foodstuffs between the East European space and the Global South across the colonial and imperial routes.
For the exhibition we perceive individual artistic works, practices and relations, threaded with the work of collectives they are part of, or founders of, or foundational for. An exhibition is not a site of atomised positions, extracted from their interweaving with life, but a place of encounter with engaged and situated perspectives, of artists who are also community builders, of practitioners of the land who have also the overview of where their work needs to stimulate the imaginary of hope.
The exhibition is co-produced by tranzit.ro/Bucharest.
Credit photo: Detail of Toj Óolal. A Game of Relational Thinking, 2022. By Weaving Realities Collective, (Aldo Ramos and Yuchen Li) in collaboration with Suumil Móokt'aan Colectivo and Renee Bonte. A commissioned artwork by Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills and CasCo in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
