An installation by Juliette Ezaoui
24 January – 28 February (Saturdays only)
‘The Unearth Theatre’ takes us on a journey into a subterranean world. Immersed in the life of the soil’s inhabitants, this is an installation which lets their interconnectivity emerge on the surface. Through the playful medium of a theatre, it shows us the networks that shape the materiality of the soil and, with it, our landscape.
Juliette made the installation’s surrounding framework of timber structures, from fencing materials once used in the landscape. They form architectural spaces and portals where the intimacy of all these resonant connections can unfold.
The Worm’s Biome Circus
Moving lights shift across the space, revealing earthworm sculptures as mysterious beings. At times they appear as gods, at times ghosts — as their shadows stretch and mutate across the walls. The decomposers and other soil creatures become new spirits, almost like deities.
The work invites the viewer to look at these new connections, to question their own relationship with the more than human. The artist invites us to to gently de-centre our anthropocentric point of view, towards one of reciprocity — with a springtail, a worm, a grasshopper.
Subterranean ecosystem
This intricate subterranean ecosystem has been deeply affected by human industrialisation, which has steadily altered the ancestral mutualisation, exchanges, and symbioses that generate life. Some connections have disappeared; others have twisted into new forms — appearing as ghosts and monsters in our present landscape.
Elevating the more than human
Through poetical theatre scenes, the work seeks a re-enchantment to bring back meaningful ways of connection with the non-human. It celebrates our eye as a tool to see the magic that surrounds us
Quiet acts of mutualisation, transformation, and exchange have been restored here,
inspired by the spiritual clay forms from Cypriot Minoan culture. Through this symbolic association deep in ancient history, the artist aims for the sculptures to elevate the non-human – the more than human – to a kind of sacred status.
Juliette Ezaoui
Juliette Ezaoui’s practice investigates the complex inter-relationships between living and non-living, and human and non-human systems that generate the soil. Through drawings, sculpture, and immersive installations, she reveals soil as a material that builds our spatial environment, on which our collective survival is inherently dependent, and therefore as a deeply political materiality.
With a background in Interior Architecture, Organic Horticulture, and Fine Art, she sits herself at the intersection of these different systems of knowledge. She cross-pollinates them through art to create new ways of understanding. Scientific knowledge ends up in theatrical installations, religious drawings, or being merged in Bingo games.
The ecological crisis, in its economic, political, and social dimensions, is overwhelming — its scale can easily paralyse any attempt to act. Art, however, has the capacity to reach the emotional part of the human experience, and through that, open the door to intellectual questioning. She believes this is where art plays a vital role in generating new ideas to shift toward new societal paradigms. She conceives each work as a tool — a means to decentralize the I/’the eye’, to invite curiosity and empathy toward ‘the other’, toward an expanded network of selves.
Juliette Ezaoui is a GroundWork NetWork Associate
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