You Lie Beneath it All

John Grzinich

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John Grzinich

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John Grzinich

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Description

Part of the Tartu Light Biennale (TAVA 26) programme, the exhibition reveals a glimpse of the biodiversity thriving beneath the soil. For the exhibition, the artist has created stylized, larger-than-life “portraits” of organisms that live in the soil. In this way, the artist hopes to disrupt our habitual, human-centred sense of scale.

Our lives depend on soil, yet we rarely think of it as something valuable that needs to be cared for and nourished. In contemporary thinking, soil has been reduced to little more than a place from which to harvest crops, to trample and plough endlessly, and into which to pour waste and debris, because soil seems to tolerate everything. Such an attitude has brought us to a situation where soil fertility has declined drastically, and according to scientists, humanity has, on average, only around sixty harvests left.
One step towards recognising the value of soil is to acknowledge it as a living environment – a habitat in which continuous and diverse forms of life take place. The aim of this work is to bring to light a fragment of the biodiversity that exists beneath the soil. It is an attempt to shift our anthropocentric perspective, to perceive soil not as meaningless dirt, but as a multilayered habitat. Mycelial networks, plant roots, bacteria, protozoa, algae, nematodes, springtails, centipedes, mites, and all the others who inhabit the world beneath our feet – this is a hidden life that is difficult to comprehend at a human scale, yet upon which the world depends.
For the exhibition, stylised, oversized “portraits” of life forms inhabiting the soil have been created. The author hopes in this way to disrupt our habitual, anthropocentric sense of scale. Enlargement is not merely a visual device here, but an ethical gesture that gives scale to what we otherwise fail to notice. What is usually microscopic and hidden is presented on a monumental scale. The images are perforated onto paper, through which natural or artificial light shines from the punctures.
The exhibition is accompanied by a sound composition by John Grzinich, created from recordings made beneath the ground.

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