Introduction by Martina Denegri, curator of GROUND.
The exhibition GROUND invites interdisciplinary artists to explore attunement as both a metaphor and a methodology for grounding ourselves in the web of life. Attunement begins in the effort to actively listen: the first step towards rediscovering our role and responsibilities in the worlds we shape and share with many human and non-human others.
In the midst of an unprecedented ecological crisis it is easy, almost inevitable, to get caught between the noise of techno-futurist utopias and the deafening silence of hopelessness. But if we stop for a second to consider our world in a state of emergency but rather of emergence of alternative responses, we might just hear the whispers of the more-than-human life that surrounds and sustains us. It is through these often hidden frequencies that wisdom is stored and passed on to those who do not see natural resources but sentient beings, who reject extraction in favour of care and reciprocity. But how do we (re)learn to listen to the whispers and hums of more-than-human life? How can we attune our bodies, organisations and technologies to their subtle rhythms?
Since becoming a Zoöp in 2024, CCU has been researching what it means to collaborate with more-than-human life towards a shared, habitable planet. GROUND brings together different strands of this research. Artworks function less as finished objects than as living, iterative prototypes that evolve through their dialogue across species, time and scales. Some works, as Sunjoo Lee’s Electric Garden, attune to the slow, unpredictable cycles of atmospheric forces, soil, and bacteria. In others, such as Werner de Valk’s Trailer or Mink Bol’s installation, media technologies expand our capacity to relate by making the worlds of birds, trees, rodents and algorithms audible. The exhibition also showcases the outcomes of participatory processes, such as the PCBs made with natural clay during a workshop with Stefanie Wuschitz and Patricia Reis. Countering a tendency to see the digital as abstract, disembodied or frictionless, these artistic interventions invite us to think of technologies made with the world: reckoning with scarcity, and respecting the rhythms and needs or more-than-human others.
The Hof van Cartesius and the Werkspoor area are the fertile grounds the exhibition grows from and nurtures. Here, listening becomes a situated practice of attunement to the murmurs of the soil, and to the slow negotiations of multispecies coexistence. Together with our human and non-human neighbours we invite the visitors of GROUND on an open-ended journey towards liveable futures on this damaged planet.
