Plot

With Plot, Museion explores new ground for experiential and collaborative practices of exhibition-making. By establishing a dialogue between visual art, science, architecture, dance, and local participants with a strong relation to soil, the project draws on and generates situated knowledge. Raza’s exhibition stems from his site-specific installation Absorption and his evolving video work Ge. Absorption will fill the second floor of Museion with more than 60 tons of artificial “neosoil” in collaboration with soil scientists and a “soil coordinator” sourcing local materials and waste products, including clay, grape marc, marble dust, coffee grounds, pizza oven ash, human hair, and more. These materials will be mixed, turned over, and continually added to by a group of cultivators, who will also offer visitors fertile neosoil to take home for their own projects and cultivations.

Raza’s work often acts as a host to other artist’s interventions: in Plot the artist offers the entire mise-en-scène to other practitioners to develop their own temporal chapters. Thus, the piece will undergo successive metamorphoses, starting from the first day of the exhibition. The former library of Museion will become a storehouse of soil ingredients and a workshop setting where neosoil is transformed into mud bricks, laying the groundwork for the second chapter of the plot.

Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, Raza’s evolving video work Ge is screened for the duration of the exhibition. Ge, whose title refers to the original name of Gaia, maps various biotopes of Earth, functioning as an ongoing poetic journal and meditation. The first “stanza” of this open-ended work explores the seaside landscape around the cottage of James Lovelock, who developed the theory that the earth is a self-regulating, living system. The second provides a recipe for making artificial soil at home. Over the course of Plot, Ge will evolve further, with the appearance of new “stanzas”, set on Lake Erie, at the ruined convent of Hildegard von Bingen, and elsewhere.

The title Plot, which can describe a piece of land, a (floor) plan, and the turns and twists of a narrative, alludes to the exhibition’s various conceptual dimensions. Like the plot of a novel, the exhibition evolves in different chapters, each one creating poetic and sensual encounters between natural, artificial, living and non-living entities, and a sense of porosity between bodies, architecture, and landscape.