Materials: cement, polyurethane, plexiglass, direct UV printing, 2021
The work was presented at the collective exhibition "Grounding" as part of the Ars Electronica festival at the Dokuchaev Museum of Soil Science in St. Petersburg
The work consists of two scenario maps. One, according to the author, is retrospective, unfolds here and now, the second is alternative.
Both maps are sharing a common structure. They are focused on influential natural science positions and surrounding layers: semantic, political and conceptual. However, in the first scenario, the internal pressure is distributed from outside to inside. The conceptual frame forms the political one. Trough the language frame, the political is tightly compressed into the most influential scientific metaphors and hypotheses of the past century. Significant part of the work is focused on the transformation and interaction of the contexts from which these metaphors were originate. On that part, losing their support, they eventually found their application in a distorted form. Thus, exposing itself as a substitution of context helps particular concepts to return from the field of imaginary objectivity back to the territory of the subjective.
In the second scenario the pressure is distributed from the inside to the outside. The updated natural science layer, taking into account the alternative concepts and discoveries of recent years, cascadingly transforming the outer layers and introducing alternative constructs in place of the established acting ones. The viewer is invited to think about how their inclusion can change the structure of thinking and affects our interaction with each other and with other entities.
As a particular example of such interaction, the existing agricultural technology of industrial farming was taken. The relationship between man and soil is important as an example, since at the same time being a rich multi-layered bio-mineral body, the basis of a human physical existence, soil becomes the central hero of the unfolding environmental crisis and, at the same time, one of the main expectants for carbon dioxide capture.