LAVA LINES, 2022

Lava Lines explores the life forms, contemporary myths and geopolitical powers that shape volcanic landscapes. Portals to an underworld of almost limitless energy production, volcanic environments are also the seat of ancestral practices. Lava Lines gathers texts, visual and sonic formats to touch on collective memory, non-human agency and myth-making.

Volcanic lands are considered one of the world's largest intact ecosystems. Shifting grounds of sulfur fumes, acid ponds, and salt deserts are the only visible parts of the Earth's secret inner movements: a new language is needed to comprehend the turbulent surface. In these lands, extreme states of existence come into being. Invisible organisms acclimated to extreme conditions spark research on the origins of life on earth. Micro-histories of adaptation and resilience dwell in the stones, echoing our earthly survival.

These extreme landscapes are considered a place of lifelessness, a land to excavate, with the aim of extracting the non-living mineral wealth that makes life bloom elsewhere. Investment in geothermal power is expanding rapidly, generating new geopolitical and land appropriation issues. Modern scientific approaches have long sought a disembodied, subject-object relationship to the earth, erasing the relationship between land and culture.

But the earth retains a power beyond that of human understanding. In an age dominated by eco-anxiety, the figure of the volcano allows us to explore the questions surrounding the prediction of natural disasters, between scientific standpoints and ancestral rituals. Old and new geological upheavals make visible the complex entanglement of life and death that surrounds us and open up reflections on our earthly interdependence.
Lava Lines leans into these shifting geographies - breaches, ruptures, manifestations - to acknowledge the sensitive entanglement of subterranean physics, and our difficulty to comprehend and therefore represent these complex ecologies and times.

Exhibition: 
Francisca Khamis, Naïmé Perrette, Camille Picquot, Rachel Pimm, Mika Oki, Riar Rizaldi

Set Design:
Leïla Arenou

Live programme:
Francisca Khamis, Juliette Lizotte, Mika Oki, Chooc Ly Tan, Adán Ruiz, Ana Vaz, Arif Kornweitz and Rieko Whitfield

Radio by Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee. Publication by Folium Publishing

Curated by Leïla Arenou and Naïmé Perrette

Supported by Fluxus Art Projects,  Arts Council England, Creative Industries Fund NL, the Embassy of the Netherlands

Photos by Noémie Reijnen and Jordan Ramone

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