“Whether these splits and fissures are records of community care, or an evolutionary resilience, is impossible to read without the long-decomposed context. The artifacts of meaning are soft spectres and fading traces. The substance of life is fleeting, and neither desire nor dusks make for good fossils.”
(Un)earthed: On burial, radioactive horizons and the flesh of the mollusc that secreted shell
Commissioned by Next Wave for the All School Reading Room, (Un)Earthed is a hybrid, reflective, and speculative piece created in response to Burial, a performance installation and live improvised audio-visual exchange created by Devika Bilimoria and Amias Hanley. The artists state, ‘Burial explored the opacities and densities of speculative underworlds using macro image-making techniques and discarded objects, to conjure the decomposition, movement, and compression of earthly substances.’ In response, (Un)earthed weaves these themes centering one of the developmental threads of the work, a curiosity about communication over extended durations, as mediated by the undulations and changes of geologic realms. This reflective work considers the translations between time and earth, weaving threads from the present alongside a possible future and its speculative pictographic language. This experimental frame offers a portal into a distant future, where unknown beings attempt translations of the ancient artefacts made both in the present of 02023 and in the human futures still to come. It highlights the unceasing evolution of earthly life and language, the ephemerality of meaning between epochs, burial as an act of future-making, and intergenerational entanglement.
You can read the full work here.
