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Grounding ~ Seeding

How can we unlearn the violent and destructive paradigms of colonial, racial, patriarchal capitalism, and imagine a world in which different knowledge systems are equally valuable and cooperate to defend life in all its forms?

These are central questions addressed by the exhibition and learning space Grounding ~ Seeding, the first project in the series of tranzit.sk’s new program. Assuming the exhibition’s inaugural character, the curatorial approach refers to the program’s main directions, namely the intertwined causes and effects of today’s systemic crisis and the urgent need to figure out strategies for overcoming and repair. This manifests through the work of artists reinforcing collective regenerative processes and proposing prefigurative scenarios for building social infrastructures in support of wider ecosystems.

Sharing ancestral knowledge, land-based practices, feminist initiatives, and reflections around commoning, evoking a sense of interrelatedness, reciprocity, response-ability, care for our shared future and that of the next generations – the artists featured in the exhibition are driven from within decolonial perspectives and/or Indigenous experiences, building on the legacy of social and emancipatory movements. Suggesting a necessary systemic and structural change, in multiple ways and from their situated positions, the artists denounce and poetically reverse the effects of the ongoing processes of erasure, abuse and destruction. Instead, they encourage a critique and reorientation of our sensibilities towards gestures of repair, the politics of care and examples of self-sufficient micro-economies.

Through their works and poetics, the artists call for an end to extraction and the commodification of life. They envision a new, different relationship to the natural world and to society by conveying the potency of dreams, ceremonies, and old and new rituals. They transmit their spiritual and political experience for a world in which many worlds can fit.

Thus, Grounding ~ Seeding is a way to commit, through exhibition making, to laying the foundations for a long-term trajectory of epistemological reconstruction, and seeding decolonial ideas and gestures toward a different future, one that looks at several generations before and after ours.

Grounding ~ Seeding is the result of the collaboration of four curators: educator, curator and writer Alessandra Pomarico (Lecce/New York), researcher and curator Borbala Soos (London), philosopher and writer Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu (Chişinău/Copenhagen) and curator and tranzit.sk’s director Judit Angel (Bratislava/Budapest). The elaboration of tranzit.sk’s long-term program and its inaugural exhibition has been an overlapping process informed by mutual inspiration, experience sharing and collective caring.

ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit. Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.