concept

The project aims to give form to the delicate balance between soil and water on Earth. This balance preserves the integrity of both substances whilst also serving as the foundation for the emergence of new forms of life and self-expression within the broader ecology.

The ongoing, balanced interplay between water and soil is essential for all ecosystems. Water, sourced from various origins such as rainfall, rivers, and underground reservoirs, plays a significant role in shaping soil composition, structure, and fertility. Acting as a conduit, water facilitates the transportation of vital nutrients within the soil. While water contributes to alterations in the landscape through processes like erosion and deposition, soil functions as a storage reservoir, managing water movement and mitigating the adverse effects of droughts and floods, for example.

SOIL & WATER seeks to highlight the broader landscape and the interconnectedness of multiple ecologies and knowledge systems. The project actively encourages a critical understanding of how various cultural perspectives and material practices may shape our perceptions of nature, land, and place. In turn, these practices are informed by the frameworks and values of various communities, including the art world, the scientific community, urban planners, and the general public, for example. The engagement with materiality also invites reflection on how different disciplines, including art, science, policy-making, and local knowledge systems, approach ecological phenomena through distinct tools and assumptions. By placing such diversity at the heart of the project, we seek to gain a deeper understanding of how ecological conditions are interpreted, represented and addressed in various societal contexts too. In this way, the project highlights the importance of transdisciplinarity and cross-cultural exchange as part of the various responses to the environmental urgencies of our time. Exactly because artistic research and practice are always both public-facing and intensely private, it serves as an evergreen, highly visible means to access complex, challenging discussions about the meaning of life and our role and responsibilities in our ever-changing ecosystem.

philosophy

The intricate relationship between soil and water embodies a fundamental balance that life depends upon. This balance is neither static nor neutral and holds the potential to generate, to preserve, and to transform life itself. Soil and water are not only elemental materials but also bearers of ideologies, memories, narratives, and politics. They absorb and release, conceal and reveal. Through their ongoing interaction, water and soil record the passage of time, the force of histories, and the silent shifts within ecosystems. Approaching these materials through artistic inquiry invites an engagement with what lies beneath the surface — the sedimented layers of meaning, the isolated fragments of memory, and the buried traces of human and non-human entanglements. These materials tacitly embody the myriad forms that inhabit the world, how we shape and are shaped by it in turn. Their ongoing interplay offers insights into the various cycles of nourishment and depletion, presence and absence, movement and containment that sustain and give life meaning.

By focusing on soil and water, the project turns attention to the broader conditions in which we live, think, and act. Rather than seeking resolution, the project invites reflection on the limits of our knowledge, the value of a multiplicity of viewpoints, and the role of art in making visible what often remains unseen or unspoken. In doing so, it acknowledges the urgency of reimagining our place within a world defined by interdependence, vulnerability, and transformation.

vision

Our vision is to create a dynamic, modular platform that operates from within the ancient ancestral land of the Cradle of Humankind through which we can rethink, reimagine, and reconfigure our fragile relationship with the two materials at the heart of all existence on this planet: SOIL & WATER.

Positioned at the intersection of artistic practice, ecological inquiry, and community engagement, the project embraces the complexity and urgency of our time by foregrounding soil and water as both material realities and carriers of layered cultural, historical, and political meaning. The project brings together artists, researchers, students, and diverse publics to creatively and critically explore how these dynamic elements shape, sustain, and record the world around us.

The project aims to cultivate an open-ended structure that evolves through collaboration, dialogues, and critical reflection through residencies, exhibitions, talks, performances, workshops, and publications. Each module within the broader platform becomes a site for experimentation, a space for shared learning, and a channel for multiple voices and knowledge systems to converge.

Our vision is to generate deep forms of awareness and imagination that move beyond disciplinary limits, allowing for new connections between art, science, local and global knowledge, and politics. By engaging with SOIL & WATER not as passive resources but as active forces, we hope to foster a deeper sense of responsibility, attentiveness, and care toward the environments we inhabit and transform.

The project aspires not only to reflect on existing conditions but also to contribute to the shaping of more equitable, sustainable, and imaginative futures.