transcendental sympathy / tales of the soil
performative exhibition
Ruigoord, on the edge of the Amsterdam docklands, is the oldest cultural free haven in the Netherlands, a green artist village squatted in 1973 to save it from demolition for the port. In 2023, its fiftieth year, the art route de Oase van Verwondering ran through the village and its festival Landjuweel, curated by Imke Ruigrok, and it was here that transcendental sympathy / tales of the soil took shape.
At its heart stood four pink sculptures set in a verdant landscape, part synthetic and part living: metal armatures coated with pigment over fibreglass, their surfaces carrying moss that looked to have grown there of its own accord. Somewhere between artefact and organism, these pink giants read as deities of another time, hybrids of machine and matter holding a wise and older energy. At intervals the landscape came alive with performance, the performers moving among the forms and answering to their materiality, letting movement and sound gather into a single dialogue in which theatre, music and visual art stopped being separate things. The intention was a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work where the disciplines converge into one sensory whole and every gesture and note belongs to the same unfolding.
Underneath, the piece turned on the frictions between nature and culture and the technology laced through both, and on what their coexistence might look like. Drawing on posthuman thought together with animist and ritual practice, it imagined the pink giants as cohabitants rather than gods to be feared, entities that speak through humming vibration and take nature as their medium. The audience was asked, above all, to listen, to the soil and the body, to the quiet pulse of a shared existence, and to consider how all of Earth's creatures might live alongside one another once interdependence is taken not as a threat but as the ground of things. The work had begun during Gucheva's studies at HKU and was expanded in scope for Ruigoord.
de Oase van Verwondering and Het Landjuweel, Ruigoord, Amsterdam, 2023