Glaneuses et Vers de Terre

Glaneuses et Vers de Terre cultivates ways of being with landscape as we are absorbed within it rather than as a detached spectacle to observe. We look for verbs, gestures to sense our bodies in connection with soils and skies. Head down, butt up, we turn down to moving about on the lives out of our sight: the worms deep under, the birds beyond the horizon. Inclined, we grow bodies of roots and waterfalls that take up water and poor it out, enabling complete cycles and processes of regeneration to take place.

‘Table du zine’, the first edition of Glaneuses et Vers de Terre, initiated the project in 2021 and continues since. This repetitive participatory practice is bound to Les Minières, spaces for regenerative agriculture and artistic practices in Normandy. A growing collection of by now over 100 pages collaging agroecology and dance forms a soil to reading sessions. Playing with a tactile gaze—eyes being feet—readers wander through the landscape of spread-out pages.

Bodies bending down in gardens, bodies of readers inclined over books; we started to notice the posture head-down/butt-up everywhere we looked. Why does

one bend over? What is our relation to landscape in this this posture? We sense the relevance of turning down our gaze to living soils and what lives there. While the practice of reading invites readers to turn into bookworms, we wish to let the posture of our folded bodies bring us closer to worms, the largest living mass on earth, under our feet. We read Darwin’s ‘Worm- book’. We engage in conversation. We talk with artist Debra Solomon (co-founder of Urbaniahoeve, social lab for urban agriculture). We talk with artist and gardener Jo Willoughby. We persistently talk with Cyril Gallier (living soils gardener and co-founder of Les Minières).

‘Bookworms and the Worm-book’ is the edition developed through the encounter of different soils. We try to understand the life under the surface of where we land. We bring to it other spaces we once inclined to, beyond our sight, under our feet, past the horizon, 12 km from us, 648 km from here, 222 km from there, 999 to the next landing. We talk to the worms. We sang to them: ... stay, stay. Cover our stones, bury our buildings, penetrate the cracks. Eat earth, plastic, plaster and facade. Enrich our soils. We will do nothing. For a change.

 

Bios

Emilie Gallier is a choreographer researcher working between The Netherlands and France where she co-founded Les Minières, between regenerative agriculture and artistic practices. She developed the idea and practice of reading in performance in her thesis 'Reading in Performance, Lire en spectacle' (2021, Coventry University, DAS Graduate School). She is interested in the unwritten that thrives in the written, entangled ecosystems and living soils. She practices and research within DAS Research Amsterdam where she also tutors fellows of the program THIRD www.post-cie.com 

Nienke Terpsma is a visual artist and book designer. Since 2004, she has been making the traveling artist-(maga)zine for non-academic research Fucking Good Art with Rob Hamelijnck. FGA is engaged in field research into the humus, life around art, (local) conditions of art and culture, with a special interest in oral history, idea history, anarchism, ecology. www.fuckinggoodart.

Nina Boas graduated from AKI, ArtEZ in Enschede (NL) in 2003. Since then, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice (performance, drawing, installations, scenography). She blurs reality and the imaginary world with personal stories that resemble a daydream. www.ninaboas.com

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