Contemporary art and other disciplines are increasingly concerned with establishing a direct relationship with landscape, organisms, and material reality. To mark its 10th anniversary, PLATO Ostrava, a city-funded organization of the City of Ostrava, organizes Soil and Friends exhibition, which presents soil as a living, complex entity. Rethinking our relationship to soil – understood as a community of billions of organisms that profoundly influence climate, water cycles, and living conditions on Earth – also offers a path towards addressing the environmental crisis. Through a range of themes and diverse artistic approaches, Soil and Friends deepens our perception of the fascinating diversity of soil, which is often overlooked and taken for granted. Thanks to the attention of artists, eco-activists, scientists, and thinkers, soil emerges from the fog of ordinariness, indifference and oblivion.

The theme of agriculture and landscape regeneration is presented by artist Denisa Langrová, in an imaginary dialogue with soil microbiologist Walter Jehne. Their message is: do not burn but deposit into soil! Langrová presents the concept of a soil-carbon sponge that facilitates water retention, carbon sequestration, and the renewal of soil fertility and is a tool for mitigating climate change. Other projects show that human culture can also participate in natural cycles and stress its transformative potential. The exhibition further expands on the understanding of soil as a space where communication and relationships between the human and more-than-human world take place. The Sounding Soil project reveals that the underground landscape is not silent, but that soil is a dynamic ecosystem whose health can also be perceived acoustically. Another important focus is landscape impacted by industry. Field Guide by artist Rosario Talevi maps the transformed post-industrial Ostrava and searches for new ways of relating to such landscape. Rather than enumerating types of ecological damage, Talevi highlights the present-day life of these places and their potential for renewal. Similarly, the garden surrounding the gallery uses permaculture principles to engage with contaminated soil through plants that recultivate, not by technical intervention.

The exhibition also addresses pastures and pasturage as a model of sustainable cohabitation. Pastures and their existence depend on herbivores, i.e. “mobile composters” enhancing carbon deposition in the soil. Pastoral farming is not only an economic activity but also as a way of life that enables direct contact with animals, the landscape, and natural cycles. Projects by Judita Levitnerová and Kateřina Žák Konvalinová draw attention to a product of pasturage: wool and its processing. Other artworks on display thematize the spiritual and symbolic dimensions of our relationship to the soil. Films and installations by Alex Sihelsk* and personal journals by Spanish herder Julia Ábalos Reznak capture interspecies proximity and a return to the magic of everyday life in the countryside. Death is understood here as part of the cycle rather than its end, as seen for example in ceramic objects by Marie Boková in which animal bones symbolically return life to the soil.

The project by Centrala, a Polish team of architects, created for the PLATO exhibition hall and referred to by the PLATO team as the Keyhole, is based on connecting environmental issues with architecture and the institutional space. This intervention transforms the gallery into a semi-public pocket garden where the boundary between art, cultivation, and everyday experience is dissolved. The living environment of the garden enters the gallery space, allowing visitors to perceive natural materials, scents, and seasonal changes that are usually excluded from the walls of an art institution.

Yet soil is also part of a broader perspective on major global processes: planet’s climate is largely driven by the water cycle along with the soil’s capacity for water retention, which is why restoration of vegetation cover, wetlands, and peat bogs is essential. Photography and film projects also recall the historical and political contexts related to soil, including colonial heritage, industrial exploitation, and struggles for access to land in different parts of the world. Philosophical and spiritual approaches are presented in works by Elisabeth von Samsonow, who suggests rethinking humanity’s relationship to the Earth, understood here as a maternal principle, as well as in projects inspired by biodynamic agriculture that connect soil to cosmic rhythms. Other installations highlight the importance of specific plants, such as nettle as a medicinal and ecologically significant herb, or explore the cultural symbolism of flowers and their role in social and identity-related communication.

The Soil and Friends project offers PLATO visitors a multilayered narrative about soil as a biological system, cultural space, historical archive, and political issue. It brings together scientific knowledge, artistic imagination, and practical experience from farming and landscape care. Let’s see them as a challenge to shift our perspective: soil is not merely a resource but also a partner and a community whose health is a precondition for the future of humanity. For PLATO, the City Gallery of Contemporary Art, this major exhibition continues a series of both small- and large-scale previous projects, including exhibitions Heroic vs. Holistic (2017) curated by Daniela and Linda Dostálková, and Escaped, Found a Hideout, Still on the Run (2023) curated by Edith Jeřábková and Eva Koťátková, whose central focus was attentive engagement with the environment, living nature, urban wildlife, and a partnership-based relationship with all forms of life that share this planet.

Marek Pokorný
Director of the PLATO Gallery