The soils, waters, textiles, objects, and species that inhabit the world are not merely the backdrop to human history; they are its active archives. Through processes of sedimentation, erosion, transmission, and transformation, matter records events, movements, and forms of life. Bringing together artists from diverse contexts, What Earth Remembers explores memory beyond the human sphere, understanding it as a quality distributed across bodies, materials, landscapes, and living organisms. The exhibition invites reflection on the ways in which the world preserves, absorbs, and reinscribes the marks of time.
In the work of Masha Silchenko (born 1993 in Ukraine, lives in Paris), deterioration becomes a productive gesture. Her paintings, mainly created with bleach on canvas, transform an act of erasure into a mode of inscription. The fabric is simultaneously weakened and preserved through successive acts of care, while the stitching that frames each composition evokes practices of repair. Through recurring figures—a woman walking her dog, tombs, and weeping skies—the artist develops a meditation on the persistence of memory in the face of loss, revealing vulnerability as inseparable from endurance.
The works of Céline Vahsen (born 1987 in Belgium, lives in Brussels) relocate textiles into the realm of painting. Dyed with pigments extracted from plants, flowers, and insects, her threads are woven through a process that balances control and chance. By reactivating ancestral forms of craftsmanship, the artist foregrounds the earthly origins of both colour and fibre, making visible the ecological and cultural networks embedded within the support that becomes the work itself. In her abstract compositions, the textile ceases to function as a support and instead asserts itself as a living material, carrying memory within its very structure.
The ceramic domes of Jennifer Tee’s Tao Magic series (born 1973 in the Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam) evoke the moon as a figure of cyclical transformation and temporal recurrence. Formed from clay, these works condense different scales of duration: the cosmic temporality of celestial bodies and the geological temporality embedded in the medium itself. As the result of millions of years of mineral erosion, clay carries a deep history that precedes human presence. If the moon is understood to have emerged from the Earth, here it returns to a terrestrial condition, bringing geological and cosmological narratives into a single form.
Michaela Schweighofer’s Psyché, Psycho, Psychosis (born 1983 in Austria, lives in Brussels) draws inspiration from folding mirrors once common in Austrian domestic interiors. Its title references Psyche, the mythological figure associated with the soul, yet these objects appear stripped of their reflective function. Draped with silk scarves sourced from flea markets and covered with a thin layer of cellophane, they become surfaces of retention rather than representation. Instead of returning an image, they seem to accumulate traces, transforming into silent repositories of circulation, intimacy, and migration.
The works of Ana Mazzei (born 1979 in Brazil, lives in São Paulo) often appear as fragments of an interrupted narrative. In Miragem, a reflective surface suggests an unstable landscape suspended between appearance and disappearance. Nearby, Alma takes the form of a rising wave supported by bronze feet. Oscillating between rootedness and detachment, the sculpture evokes the spectral persistence of an absent body. In both works, memory emerges not as the reconstruction of the past but as an incomplete presence, continually taking shape.
In the video Waterwill, Jota Mombaça (born 1991 in Brazil, lives between Lisbon and Amsterdam) follows a piece of fabric drifting through different aquatic environments. The sediments that gradually accumulate on its surface become material indices of the territories it has traversed. Interweaving poetic reflection with experiences of political, ecological, and emotional migration, the work understands movement itself as a process of inscription. This investigation extends into ghost 2: words don’t go there, a series composed of textiles, mud, and sediment that retain not only the movements of water but also the layers of colonial, industrial, and environmental violence embedded within contemporary landscapes.
In her practice, Maria Thereza Alves (born 1961 in Brazil, lives between Berlin and Naples) shifts attention toward forms of coexistence that challenge anthropocentric perspectives. In Proposal: Dwelling for Jumping Spider / papa-mosca, a ceramic structure provides shelter for a jumping spider, while a bronze branch becomes a site for its activity. Butterfly Puddling Pools, meanwhile, provide butterflies with access to the water and minerals essential to their survival.
Rather than representing nature, these works operate as infrastructures of coexistence, foregrounding the networks of dependency that connect different forms of life. Taken together, the works in What Earth Remembers propose an expanded understanding of memory. Far from being an exclusively human faculty, memory emerges as a distributed process shared among materials, organisms, and landscapes. The traces inscribed in textiles, minerals, waters, and species reveal histories of interdependence, transformation, and persistence. The exhibition invites us to consider the Earth not as a passive stage for human action, but as a living archive in which multiple temporalities continue to be recorded and made meaningful.
