Back to Earth

“I want to make an artwork for pollinators – not about them” –Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.

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As part of Back to Earth, artist Tai Shani is developing Untitled Hieroglyphs, a film and sound art project emerging from the artist’s research into psychedelics, feminism and myth and unfolding throughout 2021.

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In its completed version, forthcoming in late 2021,  Heavens will be a moving-image work and installation. Created using planetarium projection methods to overlay planetary footage with deep sea imagery,  Heavens looks at deep space to see deep into the ocean, or perhaps the other way around. A multi-channel sound installation will form a choir of voices (human and non), unraveling a creation myth based on the hypothesis of a cosmic cause to the Cambrian explosion. Serpentine has teamed up with WePresent on Groundwork, a series of monthly deep dives into Back to Earth projects which will unfold between January and May 2021, presented in support of artists’ chosen NGOs and organisations. For the first issue of Groundwork, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen have opened up the process of making Heavens through interviews, archival images and initial audiovisual experiments. The artists have nominated the Climate Emergency Fund as their chosen charity.

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As part of Back to Earth, Karrabing Film Collective is developing The Family, a new film commission and cross-artforms project aimed at enhancing ancestral Emmi narratives about the southern coastal region of the Anson Bay (Northern Territories, Australia), and specifically about the ecologically fragile Cape Ford region. The ultimate goal of the project is the creation of a cultural heritage area.

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Metabolic Selves is an initiative devised by students of the Royal College of Art’s School of Architecture studio ADS3: Refuse Trespassing Our Bodies, on the occasion of Back to Earth. Metabolic Selves rethinks our relationships to metabolism, and those microscopic agents and materials—from microplastics through to formaldehyde—that traverse our bodies and our environments as we traverse them.

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To See The Forest Standing is an ongoing research-based artwork and campaign by Maria Thereza Alves to bring awareness to the protection, care and preservation of the forest by the AMAAIAC, the Association of the Movement of Indigenous Agroforestry Agents of the State of Acre, Brazil, as well as the threats to this stewardship posed by the aggressive extractive activities of agrobusiness and government alike.

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Drawing on her own Colombian-American roots, multidisciplinary artist Carolina Caycedo is researching community-led alternative energy production across the Americas. The basis of her campaign for Back to Earth is her long-running investigation into human interaction with rivers, from access to clean water supplies to toxicity levels and the impact of dams.

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#CreateArtForEarth campaign kicks off with an open call for anyone to submit art or messages addressing climate justice and post them to social media using the hashtag #CreateArtForEarth. Submissions can be in any form: paintings, photographs, sculptures, images, texts, poems, symbols, or any other visual representation that carries an environmental message. Find out more on our Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. During this period of uncertainty and social distancing, while streets are empty and in person demonstrations are suspended, #CreateArtForEarth is a call to make protest visible and create art that reflects our mutual commitment to stop the climate crisis and protect our planet.

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Earth Perspectives, a new participatory artwork by Olafur Eliasson launched on Earth Day, Wednesday 22 April 2020, as part of Back to Earth. Olafur Eliasson’s new work, Earth Perspectives encapsulates how maps, space, and the earth itself are human constructs, which we have the power to see from other perspectives, whether individually or collectively.

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