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.
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 sundrying 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.

MIARD Graduation Show
exhibited at the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam)
(July 2024)
two-channel audiovisual installation (part1, part2)
refractory clay and local clay,
glazed at 1260°
sand
cotton fabric
water

Credits to:
Dimitris Bakas (sound art composition)
Athena Katsanevaki (vocals)
Sanjay Soekhoe (film making)

Michele Margot (exposition photograply)

In Rotterdam, I stumbled upon a realization — I missed the dirt. It was not until I moved here that I realized how much I craved a connection with the soil, a simple desire for messiness, the sensory joy of getting dirty, and the difficulties of finding messy solace in a polluted city. The comforting delight of plunging my hands into the soil, a pleasure I once overlooked, transformed into a sincere longing. The need for connection with a new land led me to dig for subsoil and mold it with my hands, giving it a form that was neither representational nor served any aesthetic purpose.
If I am to “play nature,” how can I shape matter without the production of “others”? How can the binary of subject and object dissolve during a creative process?

This soil was brought into familiar indoor spaces and allowed to dry. Was milled and screened to remove organic matter and sand. Placed in water, it settled naturally, balancing within its own laws. Once complete balance and separation from the water were achieved, it nestled into a piece of fabric, where it spent time transforming from mud into clay. And there I was, left admiring this bag of soil, which was a trigger for the transition the project took thereafter.

Soil is in constant motion, whether naturally through air and water or “circulating through streams of global capitalism”. Matter, within its “migration” or movement through space and time, carries the potential to be activated as a political and ethical agent. Matter, in its essence, is not inert or static; it is shaped and transformed through dynamic relations. As elements interact and engage with one another, various phenomena emerge, leading to the establishment of boundaries through communication. Thus, matter manifests through these intricate relational dynamics. Karen Barad describes that intra-actions, unlike interactions, are dynamic forces that produce meanings and material beings simultaneously, excluding the production of “others”. These intra-actions are onto-ethico-epistemological since they merge that which exists in the world (ontology) with that which we know in the world (epistemology) within the ethical concern of this union.

By working with soil that has been harvested, carried, filtered, and transformed through various elemental interactions in collaboration with the material world, I engaged in a dialogue with the agency of the soil itself. By allowing the earthly matter the time it needs to undergo its transformative journey, I appreciated its unique ephemerality and offered it the space to manifest its plasticity.

On my last visit back to my village, I walked along the riverbanks of Arachthos. I arrived at a point where the river did not flow with speed and force. The continuous flow of water drags and carries the soil, but when the water calms down, it reconciles with the soil, allowing it time to settle. And so the soil occupies the space until the waters become wild again, transporting it elsewhere. One of its streams, having dried up due to the lack of rain, poured its little water to a point very close to our ancestral home. Descending its banks, I crossed the fragile dry bed of the stream, listening to its running waters gurgle. The waters that gently flowed allowed clay to settle on their banks. At this spot where streams run slowly, I stepped and temporarily disturbed the peace of the earth. I set the soil in motion again with my presence. It rolled over my hands and nestled in a piece of cloth. One part of it was carried and left under the sun to dry. When it hardened, I kept it with me for company on this journey from one home to another.
In Rotterdam, water from a lake lets the bag of soil become again. Gentle sounds of disintegrating clay from home echoe the miroloi lamentations of my ancestors in this new land.

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

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