On art nurturing relations with non-human others, and the artists behind it.

For the first time in years, daylight flooded the western wing of Warsaw’s Center for Contemporary Art. The curators of the Soil and Friends exhibition chose to unveil the windows, which were usually covered to heighten the immersive museum experience. As I walked through the gallery, I looked out these windows and saw the natural world unfolding outside, the very world that the works inside sought to reflect.

Though the uncovered windows shorten the distance between the refined museum space and the living landscape, they are also a reminder that organic transformations unfold out there in nature, and not within closed chambers. Neither the walls painted with clay and chlorophyll, nor the installation resembling an underground burrow, permit an encounter with raw force of earth as it exists in nature. Paradoxically, nowadays a new sensitivity to the natural world takes shape within enclosed spaces. What, then, can art reveal about soil that even a walk through the fields could not disclose?

Oh what a pleasure it was to discuss the topic with two extraordinary young artists whose work graces the exhibition.

Non-Human Fascinations

Both Ewelina Węgiel and Gosia Kępa work with soil as an archive of time, a network of organic interdependencies, and a real force of resistance.

According to Ewelina, author of the video installation “Skarpa” that lends voice to the Warsaw Escarpment, art should awaken enthusiasm, not guilt. It is through positive emotions, she argues, that audiences may be stirred to political engagement and to a sense of kinship with non-human others. “I am not interested in critical art,” the artist remarks. “In today’s world we need, above all, a sense of fascination.”

But how does one inspire awe toward something as seemingly mundane as soil – the very ground from which we are daily estranged by soles of shoes and slabs of concrete? Perhaps by recognizing in it not inert matter, but a living presence endowed with its own sensitivity. In Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour asks rhetorically: “How can we take new beings into account, if one cannot radically change the position of one’s gaze?” Węgiel offers such a radical shift through the voice of the Escarpment that murmurs from the screen. “I turn you into stone,” the earth mass whispers, and the audience, enchanted, falls silent, transformed into attentive rocks.

The Escarpment remembers the age of the ice sheet that carved the bed of the Vistula river, and speaks of it as though recalling an old lover. It feels every root that grows into it, and every electric impulse through which they communicate their needs to each other. It recognizes and names the mycelium stretching across the land as an “underground network of tenderness.” And since the Escarpment remembers, feels, and reflects, one may grant it the status of a non-human person. As such, it can be understood and, above all, cared for, as one would care for a relative or a friend.

Ewelina Węgiel,*“Skarpa”, 2025,* frame from the videoinstalation

Anthropomorphizing the inanimate – so often condemned within scientific discourse – becomes, in art, a doorway to new sensitivities. Professor Teresa Castro writes in her article The Mediated Plant that “creative anthropomorphism allows us to grasp life’s diversities, and even to redefine what we consider life itself.” Yet to approach the seemingly inanimate elements of nature, identification is not always required. Sometimes it is enough to remain open to entering into a horizontal relation, that is one that does not presume the superiority of the human over the non-human.

While Ewelina Węgiel was carefully listening to the Escarpment, another young artist, Gosia Kępa, befriended a wetland. Her cyanotypes, tinted with bog soil, weave together centuries of peat formation with the brief trace of her own presence within it. Each photograph of the “Mokradło” series becomes a record of her relationship with the marsh. “My art is not about nature, but with nature,” the artist explains. “It’s not about changing one’s point of view to one of nature's, but about transforming one’s sensitivity, it’s about allowing oneself to enter into relations with the whole world, not only with humans. To allow oneself curiosity, discovery, and care for other beings, even those that are non-human.”

Soily Forms of Resistance

If the idea of entering into a spiritual relationship with the more-than-human world sounds like a naïve ballad, it is hardly surprising. Most of us were raised to distrust any approach to nature that is not materialist or strictly scientific. The European epistemological tradition has recognized as knowledge only that which fits within the narrow confines of “rationality” and “pragmatism”. Alternative indigenous epistemologies were violently erased – manuscripts burned and the generational memory of their wisdom systematically destroyed. This colonial legacy still shapes the horizon of what we are permitted to feel toward the natural world.

Moira Millán, a Mapuche activist, calls for liberation from the West’s “impoverished realism”, that is the reduction of the world to what is visible and logical, while ignoring humanity’s rootedness in a cosmos of living interdependencies. Instead, she calls for a new spirituality, one that would allow us to reunite with “our soil”, both in the literal sense, as the land on which we live, and in the metaphorical sense, as the historical inheritance from which we grow.

Similarly to Moira Millán, Gosia Kępa attaches importance to a full understanding of her own identity, inscribed both in family genealogy and in the soil of her homeland. A conscious rootedness in one’s history, and a deep connection to one’s “own soil,” does not breed blind chauvinism. Rather, it brings a sense of comfort, stability, and agency. Power that makes it possible to care for history, whether personal, communal, or earthly, guarding it against destruction and forgetting. Perhaps this is why, for centuries, migrants have carried with them a pouch or even just a handful of soil from the land they left behind.

In Gosia Kępa’s work, everyday political resistance begins first and foremost with care for memory. “The loss of memory reveals itself both in the way we abandon our roots, and in the marshes that are drying before our very eyes,” the artist explains. Peat forms with extreme slowness, accumulating at an average rate of just one millimeter per year. This means that a peatland five meters deep may be some five thousand years old. And if, as Ewelina Węgiel suggests, “soil is an archive in which many temporalities intersect: biological, geological, human, and spiritual,” then the draining of wetlands is tantamount to erasing thousands of years of stories we will never come to know. The value of soil grows with the continuity of its resistance, for instance, against climate change. Attention to peat teaches us that time is not a linear path of progress, as demanded by the growth-obsessed logic of capitalism, but a complex web of cycles and persistence.

*Gosia Kępa, „Mokradło”, 2025, photo. Bartosz Górka, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski*

Ewelina Węgiel’s Escarpment also resists the contemporary turn away from nature. “Spirituality is my form of resistance,” its voice declares. Words such as spirituality or sanctity often conjure associations with religious frenzy. Yet spirituality need not march hand in hand with a religious or conservative order. In his book Hell, Timothy Morton argues that sanctity is a biological experience, not a subjective feeling. According to his phenomenology, life itself – symbiosis, contingency, purposelessness – manifests the sacred. Spirituality, then, is above all a communal experience of this sanctity, one that generates solidarity and strength for action.

Somewhere within this sanctifying approach to nature, emerges a space of resistance against anachronistic epistemologies that isolate humans from nurturing relations with other forms of life. In the struggle for a future and for a livable environment, we stand shoulder to shoulder not only with other humans but also with our non-human companions – animals, plants, elements, entire ecosystems – that are also actively fighting to survive. Why, then, should we deny ourselves alliance with them?

Beyond the Window, Beyond the Wall

The lessons of resistance, of community, of sensitivity and care, of non-hierarchical relations with human and non-human beings, valuable as they are, collide with the fact of encountering them in an art museum: an institution that is elitist and inaccessible to many. Even if the exhibition’s windows were thrown wide open, the walls of the museum would still separate visitors from the nine out of ten Poles who, over the course of a year, never set foot in an art gallery.

According to the latest data from Poland’s Central Statistical Office in 2019, only 12.8% of city dwellers and a mere 5.4% of rural residents visit an art gallery at least once a year. Among manual workers, the figure falls to just 3.9%. Class, then, is not a backdrop but a central axis of our relation both to nature and to culture. Many of those who work the land would, statistically speaking, never find themselves at an exhibition about soil.

For many, cultivating awareness of their environment and strategies to care for it is not a museum luxury but a condition of daily survival. When visiting a pro-ecological exhibition in a big city, let us not forget those who physically tend to our soils. And these include not only people, but also animals, insects, bacteria, mosses, lichens, root systems, networks of fungi, rains, groundwater, winds, and rays of sunlight.

So, in closing, instead of offering yet another moral, I propose an outing. If you have the means to do so, this weekend travel somewhere where soil truly lives in its own ferment – a park, a forest, a field. Give yourself the time and the permission to attentively listen, without cynicism or embarrassment, to non-human beings. And if by chance your excursion leads you to a wetland, be sure to plunge your hand into the peat. With your fingertips you will touch thousands of years of Earth’s history, particles still fighting for our shared survival.

Rozalia Kowalska

{with the help of Ewelina Węgiel and Gosia Kępa}

Soil and friends

ROMAN HOLIDAY