Abstract What made us forget to touch ground — even if the world still matters?
Take a handful of soil — humus containing more living beings than humans on the planet. With this minor gesture, Touch Ground stages a micropolitical shift in sensibility: affect becomes the capacity to affect and be affected within more-than-human entanglements.
Our encounter with ground, the world we inhabit, is mediated by settler-colonial abstraction regimes extended through platform urbanism, rendering land a measurable resource, navigable data surface, ownable asset, fragmenting heterogeneous worlds into commensurable units within extractive logics of equivalence.
Rather than representing an endangered world, the project reconfigures perception from within, making palpable the onto-epistemic rupture of the Digital Anthropocene: a dissociation between knowing about and being immanent to the world. Endangered is the lived sense of material entanglement from which tangible futures co-emerge.
This concerns children under postdigital subjectivation within data-capitalist infrastructures operationalizing perception and enforcing self-optimization, eroding shared experiential worlds, pre-formatting imagination, foreclosing becoming otherwise.
In Walking Worlding Words with Forest, children enter the forest as speculative ecology, a thick present of becoming-with. Through walking-with, they approach found fragments as a sensing objectory, assembling answering apparatuses from reused architectural tools, affecting-with wind and weather. A contact zone unfolds that invites correspondence and resonance.
Rather than defining resonance conceptually, artistic research thickens theory by forcing it to take place. As resistance, it refuses optimization and control, sustaining shared situations in which other modes of worlding can be rehearsed. The presentation combines performative documentation and weather-altered drawings, holding open the ineffable, where sensing precedes articulation.