all time

In this newly commissioned poem, Pratyusha engages with the calls, voices and worlds of the Back to Earth exhibition.

How can we commune with rivers and think of them as persons – perhaps as both our ancestors and descendants? Can we understand the pain of the land as our own pain, and act to heal it along with ourselves? The Back to Earth exhibition at Serpentine North brings together such questions from artists, designers, researchers, and thinkers around the world. As part of Serpentine’s ongoing Back to Earth project addressing the climate emergency, the exhibition doesn’t aim to offer solutions, but to instead make space for diverse responses and emotions.

We invited Pratyusha – a poet, editor and critic whose work often expresses ecological thinking and the sensations of the living world – to explore the show through writing. The polyvocal poem that she shares here winds between prose–poetry and an irregular form of verse, resonating with the exhibition through the textures, positions and places that surface, and echoing its sense of multiplicity in an uncertain time.