Swamp_Matter
The Stones Only Appear To Be Non-Living

Curated by
Maja Burja

Exhibition
27 November–20 December 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Countless drops carve underground cavities into a mass of limestone – rituals, graves, shelters at the gates to the underground – an explorer’s descent into the dark mouth of a cave – smooth wet surfaces wind into the unknown depth – the flash of a magnesium strip – sediments, speleothems, draperies, columns, rimstone pools – pitons, carbide lamps, electricity, concrete – ultrasonic bat screeches – floods, alluvium, blowholes – the Reka River disappears into the underworld with deafening noise.

In the project The Stones Only Appear To Be Non-Living, the duo Swamp_Matter explores the karstic system of water caves as a temporally and materially manifold depository of climate history. The immersive installation has been created based on a situated and embodied research of the Škocjan Caves and builds a speculative and multilayered setting of transformations and dimensions beyond the human, which actively produces new modes of openness to the world.

In the framework of deep geological time, the seemingly eternal, atmospherically stable and petrified cave is an environment of flux. As a primordial heterotopy that combines the opposites of the living and the non-living, the known and the unknown, permanence and transitions, the ancient past and a distant future, it represents a glitch in the history of appropriating natural environments – an unrecognisable, uneven and changeable area that resists clear boundaries and dividing lines, even to the surface.  

A zone of constant percolation into the depths, opening up ever new inaccessible areas, and a simultaneous constant accumulation of sediments and overground material is formed by the Reka River, which, in the installation, becomes a vessel for the heterochronic narrative of the underground. The passage between various dimensions of the river – from droplets to the ponor – is channelled by sound, which dissolves bodies and guides them underground.

The researchers attempt to build an interface for interacting with the underground world beyond observation or reading using multiple – insufficient, partial, failed and contradictory – means of mediation. They thus articulate a new site that accepts the glitch in its entirety and establishes a channel for expressing the multitude of possible dimensions of an environment that actively opposes visibility, clarity, productivity and meaning.  

In the development of new procedures of localisation, they combine organic, soil and technological elements – discrete series of data points, surface captures with photogrammetry, procedural (human and automated) reconstructions of deep-time sediments, casts of once stolen cave formations, models between the physical and the digital and projections of growth algorithms. 

Hyperlocalised and fragmented artefacts erode the image of a non-living and permanent landscape, outlining a new, unknown and onto-epistemologically open terrain. They open a new area of sensitivity that emphasises the instability of our own ground in the wake of the depths of the Earth’s crust, from which the horror of the Planet as an indifferent, unrepresentable and uncontrollable world-without-us leaks.