Grounded

Presented as part of the exhibition La fonte dell’opera, curated by Davide Silvioli, Grounded unfolds within a garden inside Veio Park, providing a site for a subsoil investigation that engages both participants and the natural environment. The project draws conceptual inspiration from the Mesopotamian tale “The Descent of Ištar into the Underworld”, framing excavation as a contemporary catabasis, a descent into a subterranean realm that teems with worms, insects, roots, and other non-human presences. This gesture, simultaneously simple, primordial, and revealing, transforms the act of digging into a performative engagement with the hidden layers of the world.

The excavation process generates cavities and voids that operate on multiple levels. On one hand, they manifest as physical absences within the earth; on the other, they act as metaphors for alternative relationships with the world, spaces where human-centered hierarchies are suspended and non-anthropocentric interactions can emerge. These voids also function as thresholds, inviting reflection on the urgent ecological, social, and political issues of our time. By digging, touching, and manipulating the soil, participants confront the material reality of decay, contamination, and the latent life that exists beneath the visible surface, revealing both the horror and the resilience of natural systems in parallel with human intervention.

Once the performative act of excavation was complete, the voids were filled with flows of cement poured directly into the cavities. After solidification, the extracted forms became non-homogeneous, monstrous sculptures that embody the collaboration between human and non-human forces. The resulting objects highlight the unpredictability inherent in processes of co-creation, where agency is shared between hands, materials, and subterranean life.

Ultimately, Grounded operates as a meditation on void, emergence, and hybrid forms of existence. The project emphasizes the productive potential of absence, illustrating how subterranean engagement, collaborative intervention, and material transformation can generate new forms of knowledge, perception, and aesthetic experience. By situating human practice within non-human systems, the work challenges anthropocentric assumptions and foregrounds alternative modes of interaction with the world.