Bioturbation

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2018

81.5 x 31.5 x 41 cm

Fish tank, red worms (Eisenia foetida), soil, coconut fibre, wooden drainage frame, torn lithographs, food scraps

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The colonial project has been motivated by and continues to justify its endeavours through the moral manifesto "thou shalt not regress" (Isabelle Stengers 2012). Such refusal of regression has resulted in institutionalised hierarchies and dualisms which work to reject subjectivities and ignore sensuous experience, creating and maintaining the ever-present gaps in visual, oral, and aural records of natural-cultural history.

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Stratified within compost, torn lithographs serve as a material source of sustenance which in order to perform must be broken down, lubricated, neutralised, churned, digested, and excreted as fertile silt through processes of continuous regression. The worms within the compost act as agents of an active rereading and decomposing of history, presenting such regressive decomposition as a collective and felt sensuous experience.

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The vermicompost performs as an active assemblage of substances and subjects, seemingly different yet demonstrating connections shared in materiality. This material sentience animates collective regression and combined with the layering of planar stratifications, recomposes speculation through nonlinear activity and temporality. Rather than being and seeing above the soil, we can begin to feel and preprocess, to reclaim the rhizomatic underneath through collectively rereading and re-placing history.

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