The Earth is Thinking All Along: A creative geophilosophical travelogue

Curator: Rick Dolphijn

Participants: Ferran Lega – Christian Alonso, Katarzyna Pastuszak – Irena Chawrilska, Signe Liden – Rick Dolphijn, Han Xiaohan – Kristiina Koskentola, Sunah Choi – Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Tihomir Topuzovski, Shintaro Miyawaki – Toshiya Ueno

Openning: 6 November, at 19:00

From swamps to highlands, archipelagos to tundras, the earth is composed of a boundless array of local and translocal systems that persist, interact, and coalesce. These systems not only assemble matter—they endure, adapt, learn, imagine, remember, and respond to what they encounter. They carry their histories forward and anticipate worlds yet to come.

Modern narratives once insisted that only humans possess the privilege of thought. This myth justified the relentless appropriation of the more-than-human world, a privilege reserved for those who were white, Western, male, and of a certain class. For at least two-hundred years, their ideas, and consequently, their actions, overwrote the planet’s histories, leaving incalculable devastation in their wake.

Today, the very fabric of this reality is being decisively challenged. Can we follow the biologists that now chart the ways in which plants think? Can we agree with anthropologists who take indigenous knowledges seriously at last, and explore how forests dream and converse? Philosophers turn to the intelligence of octopuses, dolphins, and crows—beings whose ways of knowing are distinct from ours, but no less intricate.

But what of the very earth itself? The ground that sustains us, that begets the full spectrum of life, for eons has generated tangled, astonishingly complex ecosystems—worlds within worlds, in which humanity plays but a minor part. This clever creature we call the earth, is surely not impressed even by the most dramatic ecological crises to come. What threatens humanity with extinction may be, for the earth, simply another turn, another transformation, a change of mind—if not an affirmation of its own endless creativity.

In this exhibition, seven philosophers, from all over the planet, enter a dialogue with seven artists with whom they felt a strong resonance, when it comes to thinking the earth. Rising from the soil, the words, the images, the sounds, the smells, the movements, the aim is to open up a space, in which philosophers and artists, visitors and curators, the more-than-human world and the elements, freely relate and imagine the dimensionalities and directionalities that engage us with the earth-in-thought-in-movement-in-change.