Soil and Friends has been prepared for you by curators Marianna Dobkowska from the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and Edith Jeřábková from the PLATO City Gallery of Contemporary Art in Ostrava. The exhibition is a collaboration between the two institutions and its first part took place in Warsaw from 27 June to 26 October 2025.

Marianna Dobkowska and Edith Jeřábková: We have a lot in common – we’re curators who work within institutions and perhaps even more outside galleries, in the country, parks, gardens, and pastures. One thing that connects all these locations is soil. A large number of curators and artists and people from related fields are simultaneously turning away from their monitors and directing some or all of their attention towards what humans call the real world, nature, the outdoors, the countryside, and similar. This can be plants or fungi, which have once again begun to fascinate us by both their very nature and the stories that are told around or through them, from colonial history and fantasy to healing incantations, or that they pass on to each other through the shared forest communication platform known as the wood wide web. Animals, the more-than-human, are also once again calling us to them and to coexistence on the land and, really, wherever. Minerals and water also speak, and not just in the language of science. We sense that we do not want to be separated from this world, that it still has things to tell us, and that the feeling that we know it was human arrogance.

The friends in the exhibition are all our friends and friends of friends and friends of the soil, friends both human and more-than-human, also those outside, beyond the exhibition. And the soil? An undiscovered world like the ocean and outer space with a whole host of unknown life. Why has she gotten so little attention? Maybe because we wanted to buy and sell her, which is easier to do with dead material. Or because we wanted to dump tons of chemical fertilizers and sprays into her, which is also easier to do without imagining the billions of organisms we kill in the process. Archaea, bacteria, fungi, protists, and viruses are incredibly adaptable and chimeric organisms and comprise half of the mass of life on Earth. Soil was our servant, our mine for food and fuel, and our principal and property – and still is, let’s not be naive. We, however, wish to present another story about soil, one full of transformational processes that have the ability to reduce and perhaps even halt global warming. Soil really is the material and the place where this could happen, if she first becomes our friend.

We thus present to you soil, which is neither invisible nor quiet, as she might erroneously seem, and the plants and animals connected with her are excellent narrators of what‘s going on in the depths hidden from human eyes. Through the invited artists’ varied approaches to issues involving soil, the exhibition studies the intertwined presence and histories of inorganic particles and soil organisms and the plants and animals connected with them, including humans. Soil has a complex form: she is a material, a source of both life and property, and is capable of having an impact on global warming – so it’s no surprise that the art world has given her regeneration so much attention. Let’s imagine soil!

While nature uses the principles of balance and diversity, humanity is founded on polarity and limitations. Alongside the great fabricated conflict between culture and nature (we must add human culture, because other animals also have their own culture, as has been shown for whales, among others), recent centuries have also seen a new weld between industry and agriculture. And just as the Earth – or, if we wish, nature – has been swallowed up by human culture, so too have agriculture and the land been swallowed up by industry. The great story of soil which we wish to begin narrating is the story of agriculture. This is not the only story in this multivoiced exhibition, but it is an urgent one.

Our first narrator is interviewed by artist Denisa Langrová, and the two of them will accompany you throughout the exhibition in a four-chapter video documentary collage. Langrová stitched together an imaginary interview with Australian soil microbiologist Walter Jehne, a longtime proponent of regenerative agriculture who tirelessly seeks out farmers as allies in the transition from monocultural and industrial agriculture to caring for the soil and sustainable food production. Why? Because he wants nothing less than to stop global warming through soil. The key action, which requires no extra cost, is renewing what’s known as soil carbon sponge, which makes soil porous and creates within her free space for water to be stored and roots of plants and fungal hyphae to grow through.

For us to keep water in the earth, the soil has to be covered with plants, ideally permanent vegetation that increases her drought resistance. Thus, the more we preserve forests, meadows, and pastures, as well as parks, urban green space, green rooves, and balconies, the more we help renew the planet’s hydrological cycles that cool it down. Soil carbon sponge created by storing biomass in the soil will then ensure that plants have all the nutrients they need, no additives needed. Jehne and Langrová’s message is: Don’t burn it, but put it into the soil! Even outside of this exhibition, Langrová expressed this urgency in an early video of hers, in which she returned coal to the earth.

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If we do want to add something to the soil, though, artist Dávid Koronczi gives us a practical demonstration that human culture does not have to stand in contrast with nature, and that nature can digest and compost it. We can add this compost wherever we want to support the creation of soil carbon sponge. We can even use books for this purpose. Instead of burning books, as was the custom during the Inquisition and other censorship regimes, we won’t send them into the air in the form of CO2, but place the carbon from our reading into the artist’s giant ring, where it will be composted by bacteria, archaea, fungi, nematodes, springtails, mites, potworms, and earthworms, to name just a few representatives from the tens of thousands of unstudied species living and creating soil.

And what did the artist feed his ring-shaped composter? Printed matter closely or more distantly related to him: returns of leftist media (Kapitál, A2), deaccessioned literature from the Novohrad Library in Lučenec (predominantly published between 1970 and 1990), an archive of unsold and found books by an author from Lučenec on political economy, shredded invoices, legal documents, letters, bank statements. Of course, like any true alchemist, he added a bit of gold – a year of garden compost, other organic material, a dash of spring cuttings from fruit trees, sawdust from a local sawmill, kitchen waste, and also a dead cat. The shape of the ring is not an accident: the dodecahedron symbolizes the cyclical time of nature and agricultural societies that divided the year into twelve months and the day into twelve hours. The composter also references human physicality: it has the same dimensions as the artist. The meaning of this is for us to guess.

The grid engraved onto the composter’s case references the human categorization of the world interrupted by an organic drawing of almost invisible soil organisms. The composter is, at the same time, a document – or, as the artist puts it, a slow photograph: a compostograph of the transformation of objects and bodies into soil. It can also be a drawing from the place where death becomes life. We have used this compost in our garden in beds for growing flowers for the exhibition. And finally, the composter itself will most likely be composted one day, if it is not preserved for eternal memory in the collection of some institution. Koronczi demonstrates to us that the transformative potential of culture is not dissimilar to that of nature, and that the two can even operate concurrently.

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Like Walter Jehne, who tried to convince the broader public, government experts, and even farmers about the need for soil regeneration, Irish artist Deirdre O’Mahony invited government officials, businesspeople, farmers, and scientists to feasts and urgent conversations together in her project Sustainment Experiments. She recorded the debates and, together with author Joanna Walsh, turned them into the libretto for a half-hour operatic film performed by Irish artists Michelle Doyle, Branwen Kavanagh, Siobhán Kavanagh, Ultan O’Brien, and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin. Her film also uses field recordings from farms in South West England.

The human mixes with the more-than-human in a joint manifesto of soil and her friends, which is at the same time a sociological report on agriculture and Irish folk music, a scientific study, and an emotional journey. Soil and her inhabitants become the film’s main protagonists; they get their voice back. Insects and soil organisms get their metaphorical word, or rather their sound, in, so that they can themselves present complicated questions of climate change and observing how humans are split between destruction and indifference on the one hand, and care and engagement on the other.

Donna Haraway, in her book Situated Knowledges (1988), claims that all knowledge is partial, conditional, and embodied, not universal or neutral. She criticizes the “god trick” of traditional scientific objectivity – the illusion that we see everything from nowhere. Instead, she advances a situated vision and understanding shaped by the researcher’s social, historical, and material circumstances. The privilege of partial perspective is then expanded by collecting and sharing stories locally anchored in a particular place, shared by a given society, and filled with personal and specific experiences, which are then woven together into larger narratives.

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Just as O’Mahony’s epic film opera is permeated with Irish history and traditional culture, Rosario Talevi‘s field guide to Ostrava’s transformed landscapes is connected to the setting of post-industrial Ostrava. Humans’ extractive activities in the local landscape is what these works, which are very different in both form and content, have in common – one is more about agriculture, the other about industry, even though these categories are becoming more and more blended together. Talevi came to Ostrava to study the transformation of the local landscape after the era of mining and industry, which did not last long from the perspective of deep time, but nonetheless left a substantial geological profile. Although we already know what enormous effects the extraction and burning of carbon stored in the soil have on the Earth’s equilibrium, Rosario Talevi does not just add another familiar narrative about the negative effect of industry on our environment; rather, she tries to look at the city and landscape from a contemporary position. She wants to look at its current state and how it contributes to the life and experiences of its contemporary human and more-than-human inhabitants. She wants to find the new connection locals are automatically making to this land, even though the story of “black Ostrava” lives on, mainly outside of it.

Rosario Talevi’s research forms the basis for a field guide that the author herself calls “a poetic tool for navigating these altered landscapes”. The garden that surrounds PLATO is a place like this as well. Surveys before the building’s renovation showed that the bedrock contains heavy metals and other problematic materials that are mostly residue from industrial metallurgy. Because of this, the garden was seeded with reclamation meadows that will gradually heal the soil with the help of many animals and plants that live in her. We are also using plants and fruits to help monitor the area’s toxicity. We grow vegetables in the garden in raised beds. We are trying to transform the toxicity from a problem into a challenge for teaching us the principles of permaculture that we apply in the garden. The aforementioned Donna Haraway also teaches us “staying with the trouble” in her book of the same name.

The guide, which is called Toxic Dust, is thus not a indictment of the past, but a search for continuity with it. Field geologist Jan Lenart, who guided Rosario Talevi around the post-industrial landscape of Ostrava, has studied this new geological layer for quite a while and is the co-author of the guide, which he brings to life in collaboration with PLATO through frequent walks around these and other places. The groups on Lenart’s guided tours decorate the landscape as they walk along it and learn about it, creating a network with nearly endless possibilities not dissimilar to the one beneath our feet. In addition to Jan Lenart, artist Julian Ihrlinger collaborated on the work as well: while Lenart provided interpretations of the landscape and all possible relationships passing through it, Ihrlinger captured these places, things, and life in photographs.

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Drawings by Alex Sihelsk* are stuck like insects to greenhouses in the four halls of the gallery. We leave their individual effects for visitors to read and perceive. Landscape patterns, cycles, metabolisms, and other figures provoke Alex Sihelsk* to join them with drawing. The landscape also draws. Sihelsk*’s drawings do not trap their subjects through the act of depiction; they are liberated and interweave freely with both reality and the world beyond it – as if the individual drawings were additional newborn creatures in the landscape, amalgams of what can be seen or otherwise perceived, of what Sihelsk* imagines, and also of what may exist in collective consciousness. Or rather, the drawings are communicating with figures that the artist encounters in forests, meadows, pastures, and their own head. It is not, however, a romanticizing narrative, it does not simplify relationships in the landscape, and yet the complexity on display does not scare us, we are open to accepting it, and it even has a romantic tone. The series of drawings is based on study of ecological and biodynamic agriculture and follows the thread left by patterns of landscape cycles. It swings thematically between a fascination with pastoral culture, the soilpunk movement, special coincidences, and contemporary, ancient, and also future mythologies.

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Until recently, soil in our broader awareness was something invisible, at most we registered her surface. She was a place without a voice and an environment of silence. When it comes to her inhabitants, we have in our minds just moles, mice, and earthworms. Today, however, we know that none of that is true. Soil creatures, though small in stature, are unbelievably diverse and numerous (where they have suitable conditions) and are constantly in motion, in changing life cycles and metabolic transformations. The idea that soil is dominated by silence can today be easily disproven by the activities of Sounding Soil, a project based on original sound recordings of soil by artist and acoustic ecologist Marcus Maeder. In collaboration with the Biovision Foundation and the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Maeder and a team conducted research in about twenty places in Switzerland – agricultural soils and in the forest. This whole fascinating “discovery” began in a meadow in the Swiss Alps, where Maeder, out of curiosity, stuck a microphone for recording the sounds of trees reacting to drought into the ground. Maeder heard an entirely unknown soundscape. He turned to an entomologist for help with the recording, but she was also unable to identify the sounds, which Maeder had assumed were made by insects. They developed a new microphone for the study of soil bioacoustics. Soil contains a low-frequency soundscape. Every soil sounds different. In addition to sounds, they also collected soil samples and learned to identify the sounds of individual animals: ants talking, centipedes walking, millipedes crunching, and grasshoppers chirping. But plants also give off sounds, for example in reacting strongly to drought. Acoustic measurement is in fact the only way to measure stress from drought. It also helps with monitoring soil biodiversity. Plant roots also use bioacoustics as a navigational tool for moving in soil. Sounding Soil is spreading its research to the Swiss public. People can borrow recording equipment and submit samples that they have collected and described. Sounding Soil is also interested in whether people’s experience listening to soil organisms has any effect on their perception of the soil ecosystem. Among other things, the research proves how dramatically different soil sounds depending on whether she is used in organic (a rich soundscape) or conventional (the sound of wind) agriculture. The exhibition gives the underground world the chance to speak in its own language.

Denisa Langrová is interested in the soil carbon sponge of pastures and how it is interconnected with herbivores. In conversation with Walter Jehne, in the second part of the video interviews you will learn the importance of the role of pastures, grazers, and herders for maintaining life on Earth. Pastures are 50 million years old, they have the highest biodiversity, and their existence is secure only in symbiosis with herbivores. Since the Neolithic, a large proportion of so-called wild animals on our land has been replaced by domesticated animals, and for millennia, migrating around the Earth alongside the wild animals were (and, to a small extent, still are) nomadic pastoral cultures, who maintain unforested areas and put carbon into the soil in the form of humus. Jehne describes the situation roughly as follows: Nature came up with a wonderful invention, “mobile composters” who have legs in place of wheels. They’re large bags full of bacteria and they’re called ruminants.

These ruminants do not just make use of soil; they are themselves part of the food chain and represent a significant source of food, including for humans. But they also provide us with something else: heat. Their wool does not just warm them, but until recently was the main material for various fabrics that nomadic herders, especially women, manufactured and, in doing so, clothed people all around the world. The significance of wool has decreased sharply with the development of artificial fibers. In recent years, many herders and sheep and goat farmers dug this material into the ground, because nobody was interested in it – in our country, in particular since the fall of socialist wool processing enterprises. But even in the soil, wool has its place: it retains water and is an excellent fertilizer. It may just take longer for it to end up under the surface of the earth if humanity first uses it as an environmentally friendly source of warmth, whether in the form of clothing or insulation in construction. Currently, wool is once again the subject of greater attention due to a shift among part of society towards sustainable living and due to regenerative forms of agriculture.

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Artists and occasional herders and farmers Judita Levitnerová and Kateřina Žák Konvalinová establish communication with people who are newly founding small wool processing plants or maintaing contact with the last socialist mills. Their work uses the techniques of art protis and, in a new series of woolen images, art tex, where tapestries are essentially felted on a needle machine; the main difference between this and art protis is that they are connected to the base without thread. These woolen images represent the artists‘ ties to herders, sheep farmers, wool processing plants, and textile workshops and factories – but also, in this case, to the ARTTEX club of textile artists in Bratislava, which arranged the production of the tapestries for them at the NITRATEX factory in Svinná, Slovakia. Because art tex uses technologies for non-woven textiles, this technique is very inclusive and could theoretically be produced in any workshop for non-woven textiles. In addition, ARTTEX is a supporting organization that aims to preserve and spread this technique in the form of various workshops, presentations, and exhibitions. Just as wool is predominantly imported here from abroad – mostly merino – wool products are predominantly imported from abroad over domestic production. This represents intense competition for both farmers and workshops and factories that is often an existential threat. These pictures, however, were made with wool from sheep from the Jednorožec (Unicorn) farm, where Kateřina Žák Konvalinová worked for a time. The tapestries’ themes connect sheep with industry, specifically because of their interlinked but vague relationship in both present and past. Sheep are caught in intricate civilizational traps, and their fleeces wander the world separate from both their bodies and their people. In Žák Konvalinová and Levitnerová’s woolen images, sheep take actions into their own hooves like in fables: they shear themselves, wash their wool, climb into machines, and ultimately have their portraits taken. Sheep and a factory at dawn as hope. How different must the dreams of sheep be from human plans?

Also receiving new attention are those who look after the herds: shepherds, sheepdogs, and their culture. Experiences protecting natural localities and attempts to support biodiversity on the land have provided new need for pasture. Herders themselves have become a protected species as well, and together with pastures and transhumance (transfers of herds) they are part of the cultural heritage of UNESCO, the UN, and similar institutions. The disappearing professions and mountainous settings are also making appearances in books and artistic works and projects, and artists are also becoming herders. In addition to Levitnerová and Žák Konvalinová, other artists practicing pastoralism or farming are Alex Sihelsk*, who is currently studying at farming school, and one of the members of Two Sleepy Wolves, who is an artist who has also herded flocks for years, and publishes literature on pastoralism and its culture.

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Alex Sihelsk*’s artwork makes use of their experience herding primarily goats in several locations in Czechia and Slovakia and their knowledge from studying pastoralism and its spiritual forms. Sihelsk*’s new agrarian sci-fi film takes place in an indeterminate future that they describe as a not entirely post-human era “at the end of a new time, a few years after the green revolution, when animals are returning to their natural habitats and the remaining human population is focused on regenerating the land”.

Sihelsk*’s work is based on a tradition of pastoral tales, in which shepherds are understood as beings moving with their animals through three worlds: the human, the more-than-human, and the supernatural. Because of this, they are like liminal creatures, beings existing at the border between worlds, simultaneously excluded from and partially included in the society of humans, animals, and deities. They have access to expanded knowledge, they have a message, but they have no power – which is strongly decentralized at many levels promoted by the film. Dominant languages are suppressed and the film is in Interslavic, an artificial language for Slavs currently being developed by a group of scientists and enthusiasts. The supremacy of humans and one gender is replaced by a diversity of knowledge and identities. The story’s message is based on an assemblage of ideas from mythology, Slavic folklore, and solarpunk visions of the future; queer monstrosity; and interspecies intimacy. A good shepherdess yearns to understand wildness as a state preceding the domestication of animals and a state natural to predators (both wolves and humans). She becomes close with a she-wolf deity who gradually takes over part of her personality.

Werewolves belong to pastoral narratives just as wolves belong to pastoral practice. The artist, however, makes their story a way for the shepherdess’s awakening and love of a farmer woman to overcome the conflict between her dual identities and incorporate her divided state into a full-fledged existence that allows the recluse to live together with the herd, her partner, and the society of humans she had once left. Magic returning to the life of rural people is a gift that humanity uses to return to the soil and to natural unity.

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It may seem that shepherds are such rare figures on the land that they have become a fetish like nature itself. This indeed may be communicated by the figure of the herder constructed out of several personal objects of individual herders represented by the pastoral-artistic platform Two Sleepy Wolves. The socks collected by a herder from himself and another herder are unwashed and full of holes, and simultaneously bear within them their touch and the touch of the pastures beneath their feet. This banal connection can even be, under favorable circumstances, a cosmic one. Earlier, these socks would have been made of wool and would have communicated well with the woolen vest that represents both the herder and his connection with his herd, the spinner, the Macedonian knitter, and the clothes moths that make use of it just as he does – but, in contrast to him, internally. Both humans and clothes moths contributed to the degradation of wool products. While the shepherd’s staff carved with goat’s incisors, which was created in collaboration between shepherd Tomáš and his goat, touches the ground, another shepherd’s whistle sounds across the pasture, and the sound ripples with the wind between the blades of grass to the ear of the sheepdog. It is their shared work language shaping the herd. The talisman of a wolf’s head, then, may represent magic in the herder’s everyday life, which similarly makes an appearance in Alex Sihelsk*’s film. In 2025 the wolf’s head was cut off by the shepherdess Michaela on the pasture on the Načeratice Hill near Znojmo and gifted it to another shepherd in the Podyjí region, where later that year the presence of wolves was confirmed in its namesake National Park.

A certain authenticity connected with the figure of the herder, acting as a liminal creature bringing the fingerprints of pasture into a gallery setting, can also serve as promotion for an analog way of life, disconnecting from the digital world, and withdrawing from life on social media. An important part of all of the works loaned to the exhibition by Two Sleepy Wolves is a declaration that they were created from start to finish purely by human and animal imagination and that no part of the work’s creation involved the use of artificial intelligence. Indeed, Two Sleepy Wolves consider art and literature created in collaboration with artificial intelligence to be dispensable and superfluous for human existence. Their motto is “Analog is queer”. They have used this motto for analog pastoral classifieds intended to serve not just as art, but mainly “for commercial, shepherding, amorous, musical, or occult connections between herdsmen and herdswomen, shepherds and shepherdesses, weavers and shearers, and singers and musicians with expression of support for personal, physical, paper, and other material forms of communication”. These Contrasheep notice board classifieds draw attention to digital discrimination, to which art institutions are not immune. Two Sleepy Wolves refuse to read books and texts co-created by AI and seek out culture taking place outside of internet interfaces. Herding is one of the few professions where you can experience direct contact with soil, animals, and stars. “Although, paradoxically, this image is shattered by the starry sky itself, as the constant satellite monitoring of the entire landscape and its subsequent analysis with AI tools is today having a substantial influence on herders and their everyday movement with their herds”, adds the shepherd from the Podyjí region.

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Authenticity sticks onto herders’ heels like clay. Spanish shepherdess, poet, and philosopher Julia Ábalos Reznak also lent her diaries, in which she draws and writes while out on pastures, for the exhibition.
“I am brutally happy among animals
All I seek is green pasture
A high cliff
A branching olive tree
An old oak
Because my heart has been filled with animals and
places”

Her drawings mix experiences and occurrences that tend to document her state of mind. Those who have similarly entered onto a pasture among animals mention the magic of this interspecies bond in which one can feel eternity. You understand that this family can make you leave human society and surrender to the cycle of getting up from the soil and sinking into her that makes total sense to you, or at least a hundred times more than the hustle and bustle of the city that you observe from afar and on high. The happiness of the animals and the land is also your happiness, and their pain hurts you too.

“I am asked if I write poems and then
a ewe starts to give birth
There’s no space at all for vanity”

Julia Ábalos Reznak lives in the rural collective Los Apisquillos, which has been active for 24 years. People with similar mindsets meet and take turns there. In one interview, she mentions the fictional herdswoman Marcela from Don Quixote, who says that the goal of her yearning is the mountains, and Reznak adds: what could be more anarchist than that! She views the countryside not as an escape, but as a political space where you can appreciate your work and the location as such.

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It’s certainly not news to you that places other than the countryside also have their herds. Cities do not just have concrete, but also soil, where various organisms live and which is worth caring for. Cities need above all to be cooled, because they are quickly warming. Urban and suburban pasture is thus becoming more popular. Salka Tiziana made her film in the center of Madrid. Its text was written by Julia Ábalos Reznak, who grazed animals in the Casa de Campo park. In the heart of Madrid a ravaged forest lays calm in the aftermath of the storm. Shepherds, sheep and dogs roam among the branches of uprooted trees. Above them, the city resounds with birdsong and underneath we hear the murmurs of the herd. Old walls, new barriers enclose this territory. At night its borders dissolve on the hilltop. Under a black sky the contours of its inhabitants emerge. The land rings out and the city glimmers. The film lets the camera capture life in the park without gratuitously dramatizing events. It is comprised of scenes one after the other like a stage play. The camera examines various pastoral situations: herders and animals falling asleep, heat and siestas, transfers across the park, deworming and weighing lambs and taking them away, people in the park, and so on. The sound of the park lets us meld with them in a dream-like state and taste the mood of the forest pasture.

Most clearly, the film captures, among others, two modes of contemporary herding: forest and urban pasture. Open urban pastures and herders face several challenges, one of which are sheepdogs protecting herds: these are very uncommon in the Czech Republic because of people, dog lovers, and tourists. The pastures often use rotational grazing, where animals are fenced in and move gradually to a new section once the previous one no longer has usable pasture. Another challenges are unguarded dogs that can run into a freely grazing herd while on a walk; this is especially a problem in rocky areas. In Madrid, the sheep remain in the city during the winter until they give birth, and in the summer, they move on to higher altitudes in the mountains; these traditional transfers are known as transhumance. To this day Spain has pastoral trails open to the public which herders have used for centuries to move with their animals or animals entrusted to them. It is an ingenious and well-maintained system where animals on the path have various natural watering holes and pastures. We have nothing like it in the Czech Republic; during transfers, animals must pass through certain segments on smaller roads or cross bigger ones, which is a relatively stressful activity. Domestically, forest pasture is a relatively new (or, we should say, renewed) phenomenon. This traditional method was banned in the Czech Republic until last year. However, with climate change and more frequent forest fires, it is a popular form of prevention. Goats are very well-suited for forest pasture. Sheep, pigs, and other animals are also used for grazing as a form of agroforestry in orchards and vineyards, where they also enrich the soil with valuable brown gold.

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We remain on the pasture with ceramicist Marie Boková, who reminds us of another important aspect of pastures: death. Herding is no idyll. Life with a herd teaches us to reevaluate the role of death in our lives. Death is not just an end, but rather a transitional state and also a beginning, a space for life for others. Animals who have grazed their last undergo a cycle of transformation. Marie Boková brings the pasture into urban public space in the form of ceramic flower pots with clovers planted in them. The remains of animals – the pelvic bones of cows – are like palms holding soil containing herbs on which the cows grazed. Boková shows us the closed life cycle of an animal on the pasture, and her sturdy containers can help us understand the life of pastures. They also have the power to make animals present through their bones, which herders often use to decorate their huts and the areas around them as occasional reminders of some of their unforgettable animal companions and characters. Boková considers pelvic bones to be like animals’ faces, she links them with the memory of a place and questions the ways in which contemporary society structures its relationship to death.

The Keyhole was opened for visitors of all ages and views two years ago as a space for gardening, cultivating, play, and art. It has become a place for learning about gardens, interspecies experiences, spontaneous visitor activities, and also gallery programs. Just as some forms of life in gardens transform into others, just as seasons, periods of rain and dry, day and night change into one another, so too does the Keyhole transform its appearance. This metamorphosis is taking place as part of Soil and Friends, and the new Keyhole has become a pocket garden. Perhaps you’re familiar with the situation where you feed your animals hay and come home to find your pockets full of it. In a similar way, a garden is being captured in the pocket of the Keyhole. Perhaps it won’t really be a keyhole so much as a pocket. In this pocket, the institutional protection of objects is weakened, and things that are untouchable elsewhere in the gallery become touchable here.

They also have other qualities: in addition to their visual characteristics, they may, for example, smell like wood or beeswax. The new pocket changes with the seasons, just like a garden. The artificial light and sound in the harsh gallery space becomes soft and warm in the Keyhole, making them pleasant to our senses. Visitors can move freely from the Keyhole to the garden, and some of the furniture can be used both indoors and outdoors. This pocket, or “grotto”, lightly captures non-human forms of life, which are welcome. We look forward to meeting them. In the Keyhole we once again find what we need for gardening and creativity, as we were accustomed. The Keyhole, or pocket, was prepared for us by the Polish architectural duo CENTRALA – Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis – who create settings based on study of the relationship between architecture and natural processes and on the principle of amplifying nature. The pocket will operate in the Keyhole for two years. Throughout the exhibition, a Reading room will be set up in the intimate atmosphere of this space, where you can explore the books about soil. The books were selected by the Berlin bookstore Zabriskie, and you can find the list of the titles at the end of this brochure.

Since the 1960s, humanity has tried to stop global warming by reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Climatologists, however, have known since the 1950s that 95 percent of our planet’s heat dynamics is controlled by water. Despite this, when scientists built models for how to reduce global warming, they did not incorporate water into their expert analyses – in part because it is the dominant element on earth that, they felt, could not be controlled by humans. And thus, they were not able to create a precise mathematical model of its effect because it appears in so many varied forms and groups and in different places on the planet. Today we can thus once again ask: How can the natural circulation of water on Earth be restored and what can each of us do to help?

Walter Jehne and the thousands of farmers with whom he collaborates answer for Denisa Langrová and all of us: we must restore soil carbon sponge! Jehne explains to us, as always, how clever nature has been and how he himself learns from it. Using soil formation as an example, he shows us the work of nature we need to repeat: 420 million years ago there was an ocean and rocks, hard and dry rock, no life on land, and complex multicellular life in the ocean. There were no biosystems on dry land, only inactive rock from which nutrients washed away into the ocean, where aquatic forms of life competed for it. Pioneer species (especially fungi) capable of colonizing these rocks and dissolve the nutrients from them had a significant competitive advantage. An even greater advantage was enjoyed by those which created a symbiosis with algae, which were able to absorb solar energy through photosynthesis, allowing the resulting lichens to autonomously colonize rock and survive as the first life forms on land. (There are slightly differing theories as well, but we won’t complicate the picture.) The lichens left behind dead organic residue, thus starting the creation of soil: a loose mixture of mineral and organic residue with a density of just one gram per cubic centimeter instead of the 2.6–3.5 of its parent rock. This mixture of mineral and organic residue and air created the Earth’s soil carbon sponge with a substantially increased ability to absorb and retain rainwater, improve access to basic nutrients, and support a whole range of microbial processes. The growth of soil carbon sponge enabled the rapid development of fungi and the spread of microbial and plant life, and with it, ever more organic detritus and soil fungi across the earth, through which developed productive and resistant biosystems on dry land.

Every year, plants return more than 120 billion tons of carbon to the soil, but this is not enough; we need to store another 20 billion tons of carbon in the soil. This is because the green layer covering the soil is about half of what it was 8 thousand years ago. We must restore it as much as possible, especially when it comes to long-lived vegetation that produces a rich microbial world like primeval forests or peat bogs.

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Although only three percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by peat bogs, the amount of carbon accumulated in them is incomparable to other ecosystems. They contain a good third of the world’s carbon supply in soil – corresponding to about half of the amount of carbon found in the atmosphere. The story of carbon, though, is just one of the narratives surrounding peat bogs. These areas contain colonial histories and narratives of ecological transformations, and they are founts of cultural myths. Photographer Yana Kononova studies the Irdyn bog in central Ukraine, where these stories intersect. She aims to challenge masculinist and extractivist narratives that cast wetlands as unproductive or ominous. Drawing on Gothic metaphors of preservation and spectral return, the work approaches the bog as a site where repressed histories, traumas, and injustices resurface, expressing themselves through apparitions and challenging the present to right the wrongs of the past. Just as organic substances in bogs decay slowly and insufficiently, substances also mutate in history, combining together in various ways in a half-decomposed state of ghosts and anomalous forms.

The Irdyn bog occupies the ancient riverbed of the Dnieper River, a zone of geological and historical flux. In the post-glacial era, rising groundwater transformed the abandoned channel into a bog, which has since been subject to centuries of intervention. In the Russian Empire, it was drained for hunting. Under Soviet rule, it became a major site of industrial peat extraction. Today, this industrial heritage lies in ruin, and the bog – once treated as waste – slowly reclaims itself. Kononova’s fieldwork focuses on the southern portion of the Irdyn – the first to be industrialized and now, decades later, undergoing a strange process of self-reclamation. The surface is porous and engulfing; elements ignite spontaneously; paths shift or vanish. Substances mix unpredictably. The site operates as a living laboratory of chemical processes, obscured histories, and emergent futures.

The cycle of photographs challenges both imperial narratives of conquest and Romantic tropes that frame bogs as trials of masculinity or sites of sublime danger. Instead, Kononova proposes an alternate way of looking at the world – one grounded in transmutation, uncertainty, and spectral abundance. Peatlands preserve organic matter with such precision that bodies lost to the bog reappear intact thousands of years later. Kononova links the bog with the notion of the Gothic as a mode of environmental haunting (Derek Gladwin, Contentious Terrains, 2016) and treats the bog not only as metaphor, but as method – a terrain through which to investigate postcolonial conditions marked by strange and aberrant resurgence. If the Gothic unsettles by staging the return of what history attempts to suppress, then the bog is its ideal setting, says Kononova.

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Ana Vaz also recognizes that breaking the colonial history of the image is not easy, because it emerges once more in new presents. Her strangely documentary film shot on 16 mm returns to her native Brasilia. The film’s star, Ivonete dos Santos Moraes, hails from the region of quilombos, what was once settlements of runaway slaves that resisted the colonizers. Ivonete has joined Brazil’s 40-year landless movement that struggles to wrest land from powerful agriculturalists. The film’s language becomes its narrator. Darting camera movements appear to chase Ivonete through the high grass. Ana Vaz describes her cine-poem as an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a chase, the film flits errantly between character and land, land and character, predator and prey. The recurrent sound loop of a man shouting “há terra!” (“there is land”) conjures up the distant memory of colonialism. But the beauty of this collage rests on the impossibility for the spectator to let this past “pass”; the colonial legacy reaches into the present, and the current testimony given in the film’s depictions involves a mayor who has taken over the lands of the indigenous people by threat. Colonialism is like a snake that has bitten Ivonete, and this poisoned state comes back to her in physical form with each new moon – a narrative not unlike lycanthropy, the myth and psychology of werewolves rooted in medieval Europe.

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Elisabeth von Samsonow draws on a broad range of art, philosophy, historical anthropology, and ecofeminism in her attempt to reevaluate the basis of our relationship to the soil, the landscape, and the environment. She searches for diagrams that reveal subconscious and deeply buried habits and connections for activity in nature that has been disrupted. She seeks a communicable philosophical construct, a formula that would reveal the causes of the current environmental crisis. She retells the ancient drama of Electra against the grain of modern readings in order to rearrange its logic and open up a wide space for the imaginary. Her reevaluated concept of Anti-Electra interrupts the Freudian affection of daughters for their fathers, and on the contrary, emphasizes the bond between daughter and mother. In Totemism of the Soil, she goes even further and introduces the concept of the double mother, with whom the child figure maintains a strong bond. Samsonow proposes a matriarchal neo-totemic construction in which the total mother M unites with omnipresent difference; this principle ensures that every child of the total mother M is a totemic child and born as a daughter (we do not perceive the daughter in terms of biological sex or gender, but as a principle of connection with the mother). Being a daughter or belonging to a group of daughters becomes an ontological code for being-in-the-Earth. Mother Earth thus becomes the eternal ancestor of humanity and this lineage ensures the reintegration of humanity into nature.

Elisabeth von Samsonow’s essential activity is her participation in the Dissident Goddesses network, an association of female researchers and artists which she co-founded and which was based at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The association now operates in the village of Hadres in Lower Austria, where it seeks to strengthen the self-confidence of women in rural areas and promote ecological sustainability and biodiversity in the region. Through interdisciplinary scientific and artistic research, they aim to revive interest in and reevaluate the legacy of prehistoric statues of Venuses and goddesses. As pat of their communication and alliance with the Earth and soil, they organize various types of activities and celebrations. Their “totemic” animal is the eastern imperial eagle, which has nested in their area and which they protect and which, through their protection, itself protects the entire area.

Elisabeth von Samsonow curated the exhibition The Language of the Goddesses for the Archeological Museum of the State of Lower Austria, which will travel in 2027 to New York and Bucharest.

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If Samsonow’s starting point is reinterpreting the feminine through the connection of women and girls (daughters and two mothers), artist and gardener Yoeri Guépin relates to cosmological agriculture through an intergenerational connection with his grandmother Wilfriede Driehuyzen Guépin, part of the first generation of pioneers of biodynamic agriculture in the Netherlands, where the local movement was established in 1947. Guépin recently found a notebook that his grandmother used while studying biodynamic agriculture in the years 1947–1950, in which she describes the basics of the biodynamic method; mutual relationships between plants, phases of the moon, and seasons; and recipes for homeopathic soil preparations, created by Rudolf Steiner in collaboration with a group of European farmers, that heal soil and eliminate the need for pesticides and chemical fertilizers. As farmers and later educators, Wilfriede and her partner founded a number of farms and spent their whole lives promoting the biodynamic method. With unconcealed devotion, Yoeri Guépin dedicates his installation to his grandmother, who died last year soon before the installation of Soil and Friends at the Ujazdowski Castle. She taught him to prepare the “soil medicines” and passed on her knowledge of biodynamics to him.

“As above, so below”: Yoeri Guépin repeats the ancient wisdom of alchemist and astrologer Hermes Trismegistus, following the example of his grandmother. He immerses himself in her notes on biodynamic agriculture from 1948, which read like magical books, secret scrolls, emerald slabs about the connections between the soil and the cosmos. Wilfriede Driehuyzen Guépin explains to her grandson: remember yarrow, because it heals and strengthens. Yarrow is Venus and Venus is change. Place the flowers in the bladder of a young deer, because a deer’s antlers connect it to the universe. The very act of your work collects energy from the world – energy that the earth now needs. What comes from the soil must return to her.

The film that Yoeri Guépin made about her and with her is positioned like an altar that intends to be more of a continuation than an idol, surrounded by memories of her including biodynamic preparations and herbs. The artist and grandson, who grew up and helped on his parents’ biodynamic farm, has followed in her footsteps, and his work includes community gardens, research projects, performative lectures and workshops, films, and exhibitions that seek a way out for everyone from the climate and society’s current extremes.

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One of soil’s notable healers is the nettle, which stands here in the exhibition as a figure, a statue of a helper. It helps all of us across many different organisms, from within as a medicine and nutrient and from without as clothing and housing. Artist Julia Ciunowicz made a portrait of and monument to the nettle made of various kinds of fibers and nettles themselves. She knows them intimately from the gardens she works in, and she knows their fibers, which she touches when she braids her rhizomatic installations.

Nettles are essential for biodynamic farmers, who use it to make a compost preparation that regulates processes in the soil related to iron and nitrogen. They are collected for this purpose in late May and early June, when the common nettle is in bloom. Wilted plants get stuffed into unglazed clay pipes fired at low temperatures (whose ends are covered with clay or loam) and are buried for a whole year about 50 cm deep into humus-rich soil. After a year, they are dug up the preparation and the profoundly rotten nettles are crumbled and stored away.

Catriona Sandilands lists nettles as some of the first candidates for considering queer relationships to plants (“Grasping the [Queer] Nettle”, 2024). Nettles are not only helpers; they can also defend themselves with their sharp points. They are disobedient; they have resisted and so far remained beyond the reach of large-scale agricultural extraction (how long they will continue to do so is a question, because their versatility makes them the subject of much contemporary research). They grow in forgotten areas on the margins that escape our attention. People usually see them as weeds and, at the same time, medicine, food, and fibers. Nettles support biodiversity and have close relationships with butterflies and insects, while also repelling other insects, so-called pests, and protect other plants from mold. If plants can tell us stories about life underground, then the nettle is a great storyteller. It also tells us our history, marking places which we have left and where we once lived and farmed, drawn to nitrogen we leave behind in the soil.

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Artist and gardener Barbora Lungová also uses flowers and accompanying texts in the exhibition to show how human culture depicts its queer mythologies and social bonds through the properties of plants. Flowers have become a shared way people to symbolically communicate emotional, complicated, or standardized situations and phenomena. In becoming close to human culture, flowers become gendered: in Czech, the word for “tulip” is masculine, while “rose” is feminine. The history of queer communities is closely linked to the language of flowers, but in this queer community, plants are more like co-conspirators. Homosexuality was decriminalized differently in different countries, but generally it was not so long ago, usually in the 1960s. Until then, homosexuality had to be hidden. Back then, floriography was an important way for messages to be in code facing society and decoded within one’s own communities. One famous example is Oscar Wilde’s green carnation, which English gay men took up wearing after him. Violets were similarly a symbol for recognizing lesbian women in interwar Berlin after the ancient poet Sappho, who wrote about them. Barbora Lungová reveals some of these stories to us.

Lungová is not “just” a painter and founder of various collaborative gardening projects, but also gardens herself in her Rainbow Garden in Kameníky near Kyjov. Her garden is full of flowers, mostly irises, which she organizes by names that have a connection to queer culture. One bed, for example, contains cultivars that contain the word “gay” – like Gay Hussar – or other indirect references to queer culture – like Drag Race. In her floral travels, she has met many growers and breeders, one of whom is Zdeněk Seidl from Hlučín, who has, specially for PLATO, registered the “Galerie Plato” cultivar, which belongs to the intermediate bearded category, in the international registry of irises. Together, Seidel and Lungová have planted thematic beds in PLATO’s garden dedicated to the topography of Ostrava. Siberian and Japanese irises in the bog garden, and in its lizard-friendly xerophyte bed we can find the bearded cultivars Landek, Bazaly, Ostravak, Chachar, and Heliodor Píka.

Barbora Lungová’s works are often participatory, and in this exhibition she has collaborated with artist and ceramicist Lenka Škutová, who was quite recently the caretaker of PLATO’s Garden of Presence together with permaculture designer and gardener Denisa Tomášková. Lenka Škutová created a series of ten vases for Lungová’s selection of flowers with motifs based on conversations between the two artists, gardening tips, and encounters with plants. The flowers on the vases are not just decorative; they are narrators and carry the stories and situations, often simple and quotidian, where their presence reaches. The flowers are intended to emphasize intimate vegetal relationships and human closeness rather than opulent dramas, leaving ostentation to the flowers themselves. The vases are formed by hand without a potter’s wheel and their forms emerge from communication between artist and clay. In the gallery, clay thus holds the flowers during their short life after being cut like soil in a bed. Many of the flowers in the exhibition were grown in the PLATO garden itself. In its raised beds, visitors can find flowers still attached to their roots in the soil before they become part of the cultural narrative inside the gallery, through which some aspect of human culture clings to their petals even while they’re still in their beds. Other plants for the exhibition were supplied by local growers, including Zdeněk Seidl.

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I am an Algae. Becoming algae is one of many kinds of becoming that people undergo to get closer to more-than-human beings, to step back for a moment from their human self, to leave their human senses or connect with the senses of other species. This internal interspecies nomadism, these yearnings and transformations have been known since ancient times. Ingela Ihrman often uses ingenious sculptural costumes in her performances to become an ear of wheat, a cactus flower, a fig, a pinecone, a hogweed plant, a passion flower, a toad, an otter, or an oilbird. For a long time now, scientists have provided thousands of examples to try and show humans that animals and plants are smart and have consciousness, but have not managed to change our self-conception as their superiors. Maybe artists have a better chance using emotions. In our soil exhibition, Ihrman presents soil for hydrophilic organisms. One does not only become something different out of curiosity, but also often out of some personal difficulty. The ecosystem of algae in the sea and the sea of bacteria, protozoans, fungi, and viruses in our gut are so similar to each other that we can evoke this very sense of connection – or imagine a sense of imbalance in the stomach or the ocean. Ihrman studied seaweed following in the footsteps of Victorian housewife and marine botanist Margaret Gatty, who suffered from exhaustion from her ten pregnancies. The connection between life in the soil or ocean and the gut also extends to the nervous system. Gatty’s diaries contain repeated use of the phrase “A GREAT SEAWEED DAY”, indicating days of relief.

Ingela Ihrman collected seaweed on seashores in Scotland and Sweden. She grew close to seaweed as an aquatic form of life which is usually denied to us humans, with its texture, shapes, scent, taste, and touch both in the water and on land. She also carried out more traditional research, learning the names of different kinds of seaweed, collecting them for her home laboratory, drying them, and studying their properties. Her installation evokes this very process of drying seaweed sculpturally constructed out of various materials both natural and artificial. Ihrman writes: “A Great Seaweed Day is a work that belongs to The Inner Ocean – a multi-part project embracing the fact that I love to swim. The project’s title refers to the fluid that encloses mature egg cells in all land-living animals. The liquid has the same salinity as the primal ocean once had – the sea where the first life once arose”.

Algae are also plants that brought us onto dry land and helped make the first soil, at least according to the widely accepted theory of soil formation. Some research, however, claims that life on land comes from land algae. One way or the other, algae are very old organisms, even if bacteria and cyanobacteria are older. Scientists say that the oldest living organism is Actinobacteria, which has lived in the Siberian soil for 600,000 years. Scientists also recently revived a worm that lived in Siberia 46,000 years ago. Can the permafrost “wake up”? What will happen in these intertemporal encounters?

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The work of Polina Davydenko brings us to the last part of the exhibition, which is about human transformation of the soil – often violent – and the sedimentation of human history in soil. Until recently, we calculated the cost of wars mostly in loss of human life. Now we have also started counting more-than-human lives. This does not mean that human losses should recede to the background; rather, it means that we feel more substantially connected to ecosystems and the planet as such. We are starting to wake up and realize that the social crisis is the planetary crisis, neither takes precedence, neither is bigger or smaller than the other.

It’s appealing to say that gardens are cultivated nature, but it’s controversial how artificial gardens are and how natural nature is. Nature also uses us and more-than-human animals to spread seeds and aerate soil. And in gardens, most of the miracles are the work of nature; humans are just one of its actors. A garden is thus a certain kind of human concept, an image of a better form of organization, a human vision of a functional system showing us how we want things to be. It’s a revolution of some kind, big or small, when a gardener has the chance to create a better world. Polina Davydenko’s photos taken in Ukraine capture these desires for a better future expressed by people living through a long-lasting war, in which gardens have come sources of aid to those who suffer. The need to look at something beautiful, at a principle of life that continues on despite the broken world around us – a plant grows, it feeds a bee, a fruit emerges, and the next year all over again – is a small but important relief in times of pain, a confirmation that we, too, might be alive. The plant by my side is a hope that the world will survive.

Every war almost atavistically strengthens our relationship to the earth, to soil, which is often our home and the land beneath our feet. She is not just a symbol, she is a physical experience. In Ukraine, people organize group work in gardens and courses in gardening and permaculture as a form of healing. By healing the soil, people heal themselves and create a kind of resilience, an endurance that will help them overcome the worst times. On top of that, gardens have herbs with the ability to relieve suffering and to satisfy and heal sick organs. Davydenko regularly visits her home town of Dobropillia and other former mining towns in Donetsk Oblast: Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, Oleksandrivka, Novodonetske, and Sloviansk near the front line. Parts of the city are slowly disappearing, and residents have to be constantly prepared to evacuate. Everything is in motion and mobile, ready to be moved quickly. The very act of displacement, though necessary to save lives, is violent and traumatic. Plants, writes philosopher Michael Marder, teach people a vegetable form of resistance; they stay rooted or seeded in the soil, which keeps them protected and alive. This may be another reason why people in wartime stick with their plants, which help them fight, even behind the front line, and maybe even when people have to leave the place where they live.

Polina Davydenko intentionally captures gardens, front yards, and beds around human dwellings on slides that she exhibits without any further treatment whatsoever. She does this to show how the media creates an image of life in a country at war that is distorted, one-sided, and powerful in their attempts to satisfy desires for a sensational and contrastive image of war. By contrast, Davydenko captures everyday life in war, a simple documentary approach without interpretation (if this is at all possible) that shows humility towards reality itself. Perhaps she also does this for the future, so that once the delirium of war is over, we can look at how it really happened and what the places beloved by humans as well as other organisms looked like. One of the artist’s photographs not in the exhibition depicts a stone monument in honor of painter Maria Prymachenko in front of the library in Kramatorsk. On it is an excerpt from a work of hers reading “Bombs grow in place of flowers”. Polina Davydenko has named her collection A Place of Flowers.

What will we do with this whole climate crisis, asks Denisa Langrová? And above all, what will we do with its consequences? We only have a few years left to do something relatively meaningful. The climate has been here for 4.6 billion years, but we’ve thrown its processes out of balance, which has led to a series of ever wilder extremes: intense storms, the earth’s gradual transformation into desert, floods, fires, and so on. What can people do to ease the extent of the climate crisis? Walter Jehne’s answer remains the same: restore soil carbon sponge, which will allow the biosystem to regenerate and ensure us the water, food, habitat, cooling, and social stability on which we are dependent.

Let us not forget that soil is a feminist question, because most poor people in the world are dependent on soil for their food, shelter, subsistence, and often even their identity, but have no legal control over this source of their survival. Women on average make up less than 20 percent of the world’s owners of soil, but they work with her. This is why all of our narratives express solidarity with the poor, women, and indigenous nations, and support resistance against exploitative systems through food sovereignty, rights of rural workers and farmers, and eliminating patriarchal structure in the use of soil.

According to a study by Survival International, 95 percent of indigenous communities without contact with other people live in the Amazon rainforest, which has long been subject to pressure from industry and the agricultural sector. Other uncontacted peoples live in Southeast Asia and around the Pacific Ocean. “About half of these peoples face such serious threats that they may be wiped out in the next ten years”, says director of Survival International Caroline Pearce. Many communities find themselves under the same pressure as the environments they live in. The greatest threats are deforestation, the spread of agricultural activities, and mining.

Access to land was a basic human right before large-scale privatization and should remain one – not just for humans, but for organisms that are not human as well. Ecofeminists like Vandana Shiva speak of Earth Democracy, which applies to all forms of life and bans exploitation of the Earth and its resources. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court from 1998 recognized three, later four, kinds of crime against peace: genocide, crimes against humanity, war times, and – based on a 2010 amendment – the crime of aggression. Now there are efforts to expand this list to include ecocide: a crime against the planet. This is the goal of organizations like Stop Ecocide International, who say that crimes against the planet should be criminalized. “Ecocide law provides a route to justice for the worst harms inflicted upon the living world in times of both peace and conflict, whenever and wherever they are committed. Criminalisation of ecocide creates enforceable accountability for key decision-makers.”

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An example of war crimes and ecocide together is Russia’s war against Ukraine. In addition to human lives, the war has also taken domestic, agricultural, and wild animals. Russia is intentionally destroying Ukraine’s environment and its fertile soil. Fields are planted with mines and permeated with tons of poisonous materials from the bombing of industrial and other targets. The land is full of waste from war technology and plastics. Yana Kononova’s photograph series Radiations of War captures the radical transformation of both living and non-living things and entities that have been touched by the war. The beauty in how the photographs were taken and processed is painful when in comparison with their content, but we also must experience the emotions of the war however they are conveyed. This state of entropy, lingering decay, is best described by Kononova herself, who experienced everything first-hand and knows the tangle of emotions that come with the experience:

“War does not end when the noise of explosions fades. It lingers, saturating the land, embedding itself in the silence of devastated landscapes. Radiations of War traces this persistence – not as a documentary record, but as an encounter with a terrain where disaster does not conclude with impact but continues to unfold, turning the land into both witness and archive.

What emerges when the frontline recedes? Ruins are not inert remains; they are landscapes in transformation, charged with what has passed through them. These images are not mere documents, but evidence of how war seeps into the topography, how violence settles into the earth and lingers in the weight of absence.

The term radiations evokes the composite, polluted nature of the war experience. It suggests more than what the eye perceives – a hum, a tremor – that alters our sense of space. It moves through memory, through the body, beyond the body, across generations.

Here, war is neither an event nor a singular catastrophe but a process without end, radiating outward, rippling across the land, inscribing itself long after the moment of violence.”

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After World War II, enthusiasts across a range of fields were filled with a sense of nuclear optimism. Atoms for Peace was intended to divert attention away from nuclear energy used for military purposes towards its use in peacetime. The program was educational in nature and provided materials to schools, hospitals, and research institutions in the USA and throughout the world. One of its projects was atomic gardening, in which plants were irradiated in the hope that this would lead to beneficial mutations that would increase their output and make them more resistant to fungal and viral diseases and cold. However crazy this idea may seem to us after tragic events like Hiroshima, the scientists and gardeners had peaceful motivations: they wanted to make use of available energy to help eliminate hunger and famine across the globe.

Atomic gardens and atomic seeds were no secret, they have just been forgotten by time. In their time, though, they were promoted as a path to more stable agriculture, and cultivators proudly participated in trade shows. The experiments mainly took place in giant gamma gardens in national laboratories in the USA, as well as Europe and the former Soviet Union. These efforts eventually reached far beyond the borders of these laboratories in several ways: in plant cultivars based on mutated suppplies that were – and still are – commercially grown, and in irradiated seeds sold to the public by atomic entrepreneur C.J. Speas in the 50s and 60s and through the Atomic Gardening Society founded in England by Muriel Howorth for the purpose of promoting mutated cultivars. The gamma gardens were (and some still are) circular in shape with a radiation source in the middle, allowing plants to be exposed to radiation at a range of intensities. Outside of scientific experiments in national laboratories, atomic gardening was a very early form of crowdsourcing among citizens and scientists, which makes it difficult to find more information about this gardening phenomenon. Also lost was information about which mutated plants are still grown today. Some of the mutants are known, but many of them may have escaped our attention.

Atomic Garden is also the name of a film by Ana Vaz linked with the nuclear and environmental catastrophe at Fukushima caused primarily by human failure. The disaster affected a large area: the evacuation zone was declared 20 km around the power plant. Soil stopped being used for growing and hundreds of tons of radioactive water flowed into the Pacific Ocean each day. The context of Ana Vaz’s non-narrative film is expressed by a short text at the beginning: In the late summer hours, Aoki Sadako tends to her flowering garden. Before nightfall, she returns to the temporary residency where she was evacuated to in Iwaki City, Fukushima.

We then observe the world of her garden in a hallucinatory rhythm of daytime and nighttime shots. Beautiful flowers visited by insects unsettlingly alternate in stroboscopic restlessness with nighttime shots and fireworks. At night, the flowers of the contaminated garden glow like phantoms. Here, too, we may speak of environmental haunting as in Yana Kononova’s photographs of the Irdyn peat bog. Residents of the Fukushima area suffer from severe post-traumatic stress disorder which will have long-lasting effects. Day and night, the garden is soaked with mutating particles. Lucid dreams and nightmares alternate with shots evoking a distant past.

Soil gradually stores these residues in geological anthropogenic layers. Soil is an archive. Soil is where history is composted and stored.

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The history of the Warsaw wetlands around the Ujazdowski Castle, now the location of the Centre for Contemporary Art, begins 130,000 years ago with the end of what is known as the Warthe glaciation, in which rock material brought by retreating glaciers settled on older bedrock in the form of moraine fields, through which the Vistula riverbed flowed for about 10,000 years, carving out a valley. On the western side, water eroded the prominence and created a substantial fracture in the terrain: the Warsaw Escarpment, whose proximity to the castle has attracted some artists to explore it. Ewelina Węgiel, who had a residence at the Ujazdowski Castle, also began to take an interest in the escarpment. She set off on nighttime expeditions and filmed nocturnes, capturing the stories told by leaves of bushes, blades of grass, hedgehogs, stones, and slugs. In her ecological–spiritual approach, the Skarpa gradually came to life in the form of a female body that became a mysterious narrator of both deep and superficial time. The child’s voice the artist provided to the Skarpa makes it clear that this geological old woman is really not old at all, it’s just a curious child not afraid of change whose story tells of all the magical cooperation of the underground woven into one body, its body. The body of other animals and plants, both contemporary and extinct, appear as ghosts.

In Węgiel’s telling, soil is not just an archive, but also an oracle: as she herself says, “the video draws from Polish folklore, intuitive knowledge, and the untranslatable logic of dreams; it combines field recordings, layered vocals, and ambient soundscapes to create a magical underground space. It is a world in which stones whisper, ghosts of reindeer and mammoths return, and the microscopic farmers of the soil – fungi, bacteria, worms – are protagonists of planetary memory.”

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The escarpment is also a place of life, architecture created by a glacier. In another of her installations, Ewelina Węgiel shows us a much younger unknown architect, the creator of a burrow. Today, animal architecture is the subject of quite a lot of interest from scientists. Some animal dwellings are so ingenious and precise that they are even inspiring humans: the various spiraling tunnels of rodents, the branching chambered tunnels of mice, and the narrow little tunnels of insects. These are constructions with ingenious climate control that create a place for both intimacy and meetings, both getaways and shelters. Węgiel sees these animal constructions as transitional spaces where the human meets the animal and supernatural, which can lead to a sensory awakening. Węgiel connects her work to the words of French philosopher Camille Riquier in an interview with French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour: “For three centuries, nature left us alone, but now she is back, as a fully-fledged political force that compels us to change direction” (For a terrestrial politics, 2018). Burrows are directed downwards; they are places for meeting, rest, and sharing. Węgiel molded hers from a mix of clay, roots, grasses, string, and trash, which is not just making an ecological point, but is also a magical object.

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In the visions of Krzysztof Maniak, touching too much soil can turn a gardener into a mole. He does not use his fenced allotment to build a canopy like his human neighbors, but to dig burrows and build a mole ziggurat, structures that offer him a place to shelter from the influence of humans and the climate. For the needs of insect subsistence, he also built himself a wasp’s nest. We’re not certain whether what we see is a modern man moving underground or a contemporary artist’s land art project in public space. Perhaps Krzysztof Maniak was tired of documenting his performances, in which he tries to return to nature with his body, photographically and turned to drawing them instead. It is also likely – given the name of the work, which brings us to a specific address, Spacerowa 1, Tuchów – that he built this alternative landscape for underground life and meetings at his own address, inspired by gardening and the heaps of gravel in a nearby store selling building material. That he is offering this public park to all people and animals who have grown tired of life above ground and yearn for close encounters of the fourth kind.

Last but not least, soil is a place for life. In the past, when people involuntarily left their homes – for example, in times of war or other pressures from the powers that be – they often took with them a handful of soil. The soil in each place is probably just as unique as one’s home. When we say the word Bedřiška, even people from outside Ostrava know that it is synonymous with displacement, destroying the life of a community in the former mining colony unique in its approach to coexistence between Roma people and the majority. Bedřiška was transformed from below from a so-called “socially excluded locality” into a functional neighborly community thanks to the decisions of its inhabitants themselves – the tireless work of locals. Through self-help, the residents of Bedřiška created a community center where both adults and children meet and come for advice and help, solve their problems, and organize clubs and free-time activities for children. The city, however, terminated their contract without providing a reason, and in 2025, it destroyed several “Finnish homes” (originally temporary single-family homes built in large quantity after World War II) whose residents wanted to repair them, once again through self-help. Their community activism is an exceptional example of how when people come together, they can solve even large social problems.

It is sad to watch in real time as the city destroys such a unique initiative known not just throughout the Czech Republic, but also abroad. Bedřiška is to become a “strategic reserve” for the city’s future development – translated: a strategic reserve for an investment project. Kryštof Zvolánek’s documentary video essay of the same name, Bedřiška Strategic Reserve, focuses on the residents‘ never-ending battle with the city and the intentionally created unrest and uncertainty forcing them to leave “voluntarily”. Zvolánek regularly goes to Bedřiška to film his documentary, and his freewheeling composition of time-lapse material aims to capture the energy and atmosphere of the area and its residents in their fight for land linked to the most powerful story in the history of Ostrava: mining. It seems that the current leadership wants to stamp this narrative into the ground and leave it only as a tourist attraction. And it seems that here, too, the past is still haunting us and extraction of the soil continues in a different guise.

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Soil and Friends does not wish to burden our environment, so it is constructed entirely (with small exceptions) from recycled material originally made for film production, the shape of which was intentionally taken into account in the architecture of the exhibition to make it one of the narratives of possibilities for sustainable exhibitions. PLATO got the materials from art re use, whom we thus wish to welcome as friends of the soil and to whom we wish to express a big THANK YOU! The Keyhole space features recycled planks, and the 100% wool felt was produced by the traditional Kubák Weaving Mill using wool from Czech sheep raised by local farmers. The lights were crafted by Jan Michalisek from waxed paper made from the wax of his own bees.

This text was written with the help of the artists and their texts, texts for the Ujazdowski Castle exhibition by Anka Wandzel, and lectures by Walter Jehne.

The Berlin bookstore Zabriskie Buchladen für Kultur und Natur has selected the following books for the Soil and Friends exhibition in the reading room located in Hall 3 – Keyhole:

Victoria Aresheva, Clothilde Morette: Science/Fiction: A Non-History of Plants
Marcia Bjornerud: Turning to Stone
Giorgina Bertolino, Francesca Comisso, Cecilia Guida, Alessandra Pioselli (eds.): Bright Ecologies Scott Chaskey: Soil and Spirit – Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life
TJ Demos: Beyond the World’s End. Arts of Living at the Crossing
TJ Demos: Decolonizing Nature
Philipp Dietachmair, Pascal Gielen und Georgia Nicolau (eds.): Sensing Earth. Cultural Quests across a Heated Globe
d-o-t-s (Laura Drouet, Olivier Lacrouts – eds.): Greenhouse Stories – A Critical Re-examination of Transparent Microcosms
Sarita Dougherty: A Textbook for the Ecocene
Matthew Gandy, Sandra Jasper (eds.): The Botanical City
Jo Handelsman: A World Without Soil. The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet
Caroline A. Jones, Natalie Bell, Selby Nimrod (eds.): Symbionts – Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere
Amal Khalaf, iLiana Fokianaki, Stella Succi, Emanuele Braga, Jamie Allinson, James Bridle, Jumana Manna, Cal Flyn: Museums at the Ecological Turn
Gene Logsdon: Holy Shit – Managing Manure to Save Mankind
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (eds.): Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
Grace Ndiritu: Being Together. A Manual For Living
María Puig de la Bellacasa: Matters of Care – Speculative Ethics in MoreThan Human Worlds
Regine Rapp (ed.): Matter of Flux – Art, Biopolitics, and Networks with Care
Claire Ratinon: Unearthed. On race and roots, and how the soil taught meI belong
Robida Magazine Issue 9—Suolo Prst Soil
Zoe Schlanger: The Light Eaters
Michelle Teran, Marc Herbst, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Renée Turner and The Promiscuous Care Study Group (eds.): Promiscuous Infrastructures. Practicing Care
Alexandra R. Toland, Jay Stratton Noller, Gerd Wessolek (eds.): Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene
Vandana Shiva: Soil, Not Oil – Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity
Vandana Shiva: The Nature of Nature
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants