Erotic Mergers
2022
The last couple of months I have been researching and thinking about soil, focusing specifically on the bacteria that inhabits and makes it. Soil, normally seen as dirt or mud , the dusty and mushy matter covering the world we live in. But if we think about it, it is much more than this. Soil is the microbiome of the earth, it is the gut and the skin with millions of micro organisms and other forms of life which compose it. What lays beyond what we can’t see? How can we turn our attention to qualities of care towards the invisible? With populations rising and cities growing, concrete is poured, sealing the bottom so we can stand and build our houses, creating an horizontal wall between the life underneath and the life above.
The word ‘Humus’ which is what soil is made from shares the same root as ‘human’. Humans as the earthy ones. We come from soil, we eat from it and to it we shall return. If becoming aware of this connection, are we perhaps to elaborate new strategies to live in a world which contains other worlds? And where these other worlds are as important as our human one?
For this work I collected several bacteria living in the soil and grew them on agar plates.
27,6 x 47,6 x 2.3 cm
Janthino bacterium bacterium and other bacteria collected from soils around Amsterdam, Plexiglass, agar, epoxy.
