Hundred Miles of Soil - 

Soft Touch on Foot

The paradox of the movement of a flower across the physical borders of countries is the possibility of its movement only in the cut state, without soil.

As a result, the whole perception of a flower is determined not by its single structure, inseparable from the soil and environment but only by a cut off part of it, only slightly reflecting the original whole. Since a handful of ground itself carries information about culture, memory of time and place in their most diverse manifestations: from microbacteria to a single landscape.

 

Today's everyday reality is becoming more and more like an intense flow, consisting of many information intersections. It seems that the increasingly complex structure of the stream simultaneously makes it increasingly possible to get lost in it. Local cultures, whose daily life comes in contact with the daily practices of communicating with the land, as a result, are increasingly different from the mainstream groups, where sociocultural processes are largely determined by cut information and communication flows. The resulting complex communities and dominant structures eventually take the form of a new kind of soil: soil consisting of cut flowers.

 

The contemporary simplicity of movement / mobility between places leads to the fact that, on the one hand, those who move loose their initial connection with their own local structure. On the other hand, it seems that, adapting / cultivating and developing in new, free urban spaces, they are embedded in new information spaces: a foreign place for them is increasingly becoming their own, and sometimes not even in the sense of growing into new patterns, but in the sense of the habit of perceiving cut patterns as your own. As a result, a kind of time loop arises, where a foreign place becomes a specific independent soil and a place of birth of new roots.

 

At the same time modern nomads slidingly moving between spaces, are becoming less and less like archaic nomads who do not want to abandon the habits laid down by generations. Can we perceive the cyclical nature of their movements, cut off from the terrain as a new form of returning to the memory of an abandoned place? Is a new form of soil capable of “rooting”, retaining knowledge of a place and growing through time so that, over many generations, new mobility will only enhance the feeling of germination through a single succession of new places? And what happens in places that don't define themselves as a full-fledged place? In places in contact with displacements but fated to the impossibility of creating a new place with a comprehensive and common time?

 

New mobility, on the one hand, allows the community to adapt to changing conditions, and on the other hand, it opens up the question of what this adaptation / cultivation leads to. Mobility contributes to the rethinking of ritual as a kind of cultural and ethnographic code, where isolation and constant movement can transform "roots - paths" into completely unexpected scenarios and motives. In turn, the ritual has a specific special knowledge of the place where interaction with the environment occurs both directly with nature and through an appeal to spirituality.

 

This knowledge grows through a bodily connection with the locality and the community as such, like nomads, who have kinship regardless of its actual presence. Such generalization reveals, in my opinion, aspects of perception and reading of codes that are very important, which are laid both through the soil and through the mobility of these processes in spaces - translocation. Generation through movement and stopping and subsequent transmission - movement