all things digesting    smells like kin    stuff change    turning green    as we synch    what does your gut rehearse to tell you    after swallowing    ars for nons

turning green


2024, multisensory installation

Artists and scientists in residence ligeti center, Hamburg
S+T+ARTS ReSilence
TONALi


 At the centre of the exhibition all things digesting, a large carousel turns slowly, shifting our sense of space and our own position within it. The platform becomes a place to pause together and reflect on shifting ecologies in anthropogenic cycles. Across its surface, impressions of Czech landscapes emerge: disturbed or depleted sites, urban peripheries, and places where something is quietly recovering. The rotation invites us to slow down and register change over time. The title turning green remains open as well: it can suggest renewal and greening but also nausea, envy, or empty green promises (greenwashing).

As the plateau turns, the sound layer shifts with it, drawing on an interdisciplinary collaboration with the German National Academy of Sciences. Together with agricultural
sociologists, eco-psychologists, climate economists, and anthropologists focusing on histories of emotion, the artist duo scrutinises how solastalgia spans disciplines, epochs, and communities. Building on these scientific insights, sikau/pubalova published an open call and conducted interviews on ecological grief, which were recorded at Kunsthalle Praha. The composition interweaves sounds and rhythms from these conversations. It opens onto environmental grief and the full range of emotions that come with it – not as a single, continuous line but as changing plateaus of feeling that hold for a while, then suddenly break
and move into a different register. Sadness, tension, helplessness, and a longing for other futures sit alongside sarcasm, humour, and a protective numbness. Sound and vibration create a space of attention in which stories are carried not only through words but through the body.

The patchwork topography around the carousel offers a place to stay and to listen: to oneself, to others, and to the environment. Memory and our relationship to the world often
arrive in fragments, and stability can be only apparent. turning green links the bodily experience of rotation to an awareness that we are part of the carbon, energy, and
infrastructural cycles. Change can begin quietly, with a subtle shift in how we find ourselves within these relations and how we care for them.

Six acoustic cocoons invite visitors to sink into focused attunement. These quiet micro-worlds function as intimate listening chambers: spaces in which attention turns inward while remaining open to the voices of others. Inside, narratives from a public open call on environmental grief and climate anxiety unfold. Here listening is a gesture of care – it makes room for an encounter between speaking voices and listening bodies, where one can feel safe and welcome.





sikau/pubalova about