Soil and Friends

The extensive exhibition Soil and Friends invites us to look down – to where our feet touch the earth. It was prepared by the Ostrava City Gallery of Contemporary Art PLATO in cooperation with thirty artists and the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. What if soil is our closest yet least understood ally? Answers to this question can be sought at the exhibition, open until September 13. The project is an important part of the celebrations marking PLATO's 10th anniversary.

The international exhibition "Soil and Friends", occupying all spaces of the PLATO gallery, was curated by Marianna Dobkowska and Edith Jeřábková. They treat soil as a living, dynamic community of organisms, relationships, and processes – a fundamental condition for life on Earth, as well as an environment where sustainable interdependencies of all living beings, including humans, are shaped. The exhibition is a multi-layered narrative about soil as a biological system, a cultural space, an archive of history, and a political issue. It combines scientific knowledge, artistic imagination, and practical experiences related to land management and landscape care. Its first iteration took place last year in Warsaw.

The exhibition does not impose ready interpretations. Rather, it teaches mindfulness – it allows us to perceive sounds, rhythms, cycles, and relationships that usually escape our perception. "For us, the earth is a center – a place where culture and nature, past and future meet. For a long time, we treated it as something utilitarian – a resource, property, a tool. We want to show it as a partner," say the exhibition curators, Edith Jeřábková and Marianna Dobkowska.

The exhibition presents works by thirty artists, representing diverse approaches and areas of interest. They use film, installation, drawing, sound research, and living materials. Some use scientific methods – constructing special microphones to record sounds from beneath the earth's surface. Others draw on personal experiences related to pastoralism or the cultivation of new plant varieties.

An important theme of the exhibition is regenerative agriculture and the restoration of the so-called carbon function of soil – its ability to retain water and store carbon through microbiological processes and vegetation. Artistic projects show the dependencies between pastures, herbivores, and soil microorganisms, draw attention to pastoral cultures, and emphasize the importance of soil in stabilizing the water cycle and regulating the planet's temperature.