THE SOILS PROJECT.

Beyond Walls is a fellow partner in The Soils Project: an experimental research and exhibition project organised by Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, TarraWarra Museum of Art near Melbourne and Struggles for Sovereignty based in Jogjakarta. Together with fellow artists, writers and academics, the team will build the Soils Project as an investigative process into how art can offer ways of promoting well-being in the broadest terms, while challenging ongoing acts of extraction and exploitation linked to colonization. The project looks for ways to act ethically and with care towards its different hosts, their histories and contemporary needs.

The title derives from the Four Soils conceptualized by the Palestinian writer and mathematician Munir Fasheh. They are earth soil, cultural soil, communal soil, and affection-spiritual soil. These are the soils that humans must nurture so that the soils can nurture all life on the planet in return. Cultural and artistic forms can help this nurturing by making it tangible and desirable. At its best, art helps people build relationships with each other without flattening the differences of identity, geography and history. It can link people back to the soils on which they stand, to the uniqueness of their places and to the whole ecosystem that is life’s support system.

SOILS will lead to two exhibitions: fall/winter 2023 in Tarra Warra Museum of Art, a festival organised by Struggles For Sovereignty and a final exhibition in Van Abbemuseum in 2024.

Further read on SOILS.

Below: impression of the exchange program in October 2022 and August 2023 in Melbourne and Healesville, Australia. From a Welcome to Country smoking ceremony by First Nation Elder Dave Wandin, to curatorial exchanges, in depth workshop sessions with the team and a performance lecture by Beyond Walls in the TarraWarra Museum of Modern Art.

Beyond Walls was partially funded by DutchCulture.