Philipp Groubnov

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-GljSBZJtQ

The soil that you see in front of you was brought in from the Belarussian village “Zhirovichi”, the village of my grandparents. It was collected near the Spring of holy water.Around the spring the lush vegetation creates a place of tranquility, a place where the biblical myths breathe through the matter of the landscape.

The “pochva” is alive. It houses billions of living beings - traces of the distant landscape. The organisms in the soil are breathing, feeding, metabolising. Their vitality produces electrical charge.

Since the Russian invasion into Ukraine I have not been able to return to Belarus. The village of my grandparents, along with it’s Holy Spring are now only a memory. The memory shared like a collective hallucination of a promised land. A land, existing on a different scale of time, eternally near and distant.

A memory land, a promise, a desire. The dirty matter, pochva buzzing with unheard sounds of life.

The animated vibrations of the matter produce dreams and desires. The digits, executable rituals in the form of a code produce a landscape. The landscape was re-constructed from my memory, somewhere in between imagination and reality.

A dream of soil matter, a promised land embedded into the physical substance.

Photo by Ira Grünberger, @ira_gruen