“escarpment”
3-channel video installation, 2025
“Skrzydło muchy… cień ropuchy…” — The work begins like a spell, drawing viewers into a haunting, immersive world where geology, memory, and folklore intertwine.
This poetic, voice-led installation is narrated by the Skarpa — the escarpment itself — an ancient geological formation that becomes a sentient storyteller. She speaks from deep time, her voice layered with the sediment of millennia, sharing stories of glaciers, ghosts, and the interspecies knowledge exchanges that happen beneath our feet. The soil becomes both archive and oracle.
Drawing strongly from Polish folklore, intuitive knowledge, and the untranslatable logic of dreams, the piece blends field recordings, layered vocals, and ambient soundscapes to create a magical, subterranean space. This is a world where stones whisper, ghosts of reindeer and mammoths return, and the microscopic farmers of the soil — fungi, bacteria, worms — are cast as protagonists of planetary memory.
Viewers are transported into the underground — not just physically, but spiritually and temporally. Root systems become social networks. Mycelium weaves messages between trees. Bacteria negotiate alliances. Everything is in conversation.
The Skarpa’s voice resists modern systems of domination and extraction, offering instead a vision of deep interconnectedness, dream logic, and ecological spirituality. Soil is not just dirt — it is body, process, and memory. It holds not only the dead, but the possibility of afterlife, transformation, and communal dreaming.
Skarpa: Głosy Ziemi is both a meditation and a portal — a reminder that the earth is alive, listening, and remembering us.
Commissioned by CSW ZU for Marianna Dobkowska’s and Edith Jeřábková’s exhibition “Soil and Friends”.
