BEARING SOIL: EARTH’S PRECEDENCE IN A BAG OF MEMORY

Bearing Soil explores a multifaceted connection to the land through personal, historical and feminist lenses. It demonstrates how memory transcends mere recollection, shaping our perception of the world and our ways of world-making. In this work, a bag of soil harvested from a riverbed in the artist’s ancestral village is transported into a gallery. Made portable through fabric coverings and sun drying methods, the soil is rehydrated upon arrival in Rotterdam. Reviving soil as a carrier of memory, the work amplifies the marginalised voices of the earth and a collective identity closely tied to it. By intersecting individual stories of displacement with broader societal issues, the project contemplates identity, memory, authenticity, and the human quest for belonging. It navigates memory as a blend of a decayed past, a temporarily-not-decayed present, and ancestral futures.