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Listen to the soil

Botany
Listen to the soil

This generic title brings together several projects questioning our relationship to the ground. Indeed, soil is not a simple and inert material, it is a world in itself, complex and living. The earth is full of many symbols: it is our planet of course, the soil in which we grow our food, a raw material, the surface on which we are anchored, the territory on which we live.

Tracking down particles, sound for one and olfactory for the other, collecting soil samples or fur specimens, the two artists seem to approach artistic creation as hunter-gatherers... (...) Once the raw material has been collected, sublimation work begins. Karine Bonneval, who collaborates with the "bioacoustician" Fanny Rybak and the ceramist Charlotte Poulsen, is convening a network of expertise from extraction to presentation. Ceramic vases, like urns or boxes with organic curves, contain the sound recordings of different soils - that of the artist's own compost on his Berry property, fields of intensive agriculture nearby, a hill in Sri Lanka or the Berlin Botanical Garden. Each of the extracts has its own sounds, more or less intense and crackling, depending on the quality of the soil and the plant, bacterial, animal and human activities that develop there. On the wall is a kind of abstract composition, a complex weave of veins. This enlarged capture of a microscope view captures the effects of contact between the artist's hand and a fungus. Having given up capturing the song of these eukaryotic organisms, too subtle for a man in a hurry, Karine Bonneval resigned herself to a visual approach. Whatever the form, they are slow and minute transformations, poor competitors within what the philosopher Yves Citton calls "the economy of attention", the latter being considered in market logic as a resource on which to capitalize.

By Orianne Hidalgo-Laurier published on March 7, 2018 in the journal Mouvement about the exhibition "comme un frisson somoupi," Micro Onde  art center.

article in MDPI

Nuit blanche, Vive les groues, Nanterre, 2020
Vertimus, experimental Gallery, Cornell,USA, 2019
Manger la terre, les semailles, Agro Paris Tech, 2019
Manger la terre, maison du conte, Chevilly Larue, 2019
Dé-jardiner, Gr_und, Berlin, 2019
Manger la terre, Cahors-Juin Jardins, 2019
L'âme des écorces, galerie Louise Michel, Poitiers, 2018
Sometimes I hear the plants whisper, musée botanique de Berlin, 2018
Comme un frisson assoupi, 2018
Open studios, GlogauAir, Berlin, 2017
The fact finder, Berlin, 2017