ELEONORA EDREVA
Projects:
re-
inearth/unearth
At each doorway,
Yelling Pillow
Cradle to grave
re-patterning slowly
The sound that surrounds
Once upon a future
A Garden...
Windy Season
Eau Doom
Video Work
Writing
About
Substack
re- consists of several interconnected and overlapping parts. I planted the oats through a weaving I made that was adapted from a kitchen cloth woven by my maternal great-grandma. The weaving, the planting ritual, the care for the growing oats, and the subsequent harvesting, tincturing, bottling, and gifting of the milky oats were done in the intimacy of my home. The version of the piece that existed in the gallery space was artifacts from these rituals - a piece of the weaving, three woven photographs, jars of milky oat tea.
In this way, re- served as a healing ritual around a personal ancestral history of disconnection from soil, while also using it a foundation from which to offer invitations for healing to the humans and soils of my life in Albuquerque. The piece is thinking about the practice and work of care and nurturing, and posits that investigating carried histories is more powerful when done from the individual and collective levels simultaneously.
inearth/unearth is a collaborative video work in multiple stages. The first phase of the project was deconstructing an archival 16mm film, a copy of a short mass-distributed educational film shown in U.S. schools in the 1970s, teaching students about soil through the lens of treating it as an exploitable resource. I cut the film into segments of several seconds and sent a segment to 33 collaborators, asking them to bury it in a body of soil they have a connection with, letting the soil alter and add its voice to the film, and then unbury and mail it back to me. In the damp, microbe-rich environment of the soils, the film accrues water damage that degrades and decomposes it, producing unexpected visual and sonic effects.
This project is an experiment in literally composting a dominant cultural lens on soil, bringing the materiality of soil into the film itself, and bringing its voice into the way many of us have been taught to think about and value this lifeform. The resulting piece became two videos that run side by side. One is the digitized version of the spliced together film strips everyone returned to me and the other is documentation of each pair of human-soil collaborators’ burial and unburial of the film.
At each doorway, is a digital text weaving on the topic of the Bulgarian New Year's ritual survakane, in which children recite a sort of prayer or incantation to adults in their families and neighborhoods, wishing them and their crops health and prosperity in the new year.
Yelling Pillow is a transdisciplinary project offering creative entry points for reviewing and befriending our individual and collective relationships to anger. The project beats with many hearts, including a card deck of questions about anger, a series of workshops combining group dialogue and hand sewing, performances, zines, and an in-progress dictionary of words highlighting the different nuances of anger.
Yelling Pillow is a longterm, ever-evolving collaboration with artist sofía méndez subieta.
Cradle to grave is a naturally dyed textile work connecting two stories of ecological and personal grief through the symbol of the chestnut tree.
In this piece, I’m thinking about how we can use personal stories as entry points to engaging with larger ecological or social stories that might otherwise feel overwhelming to face. Can emotions like grief (or anger, disappointment, loneliness…) become fractals that we can journey through to gently zoom in and out between different scales of individual and collective ?
re-patterning slowly (a constant crumble) is an interactive performance activating a series of mineral pigment dyed textiles. The piece was made in response to a four-month long study of New Mexico's Rio Grande and Gila watersheds. Focusing on the theme of water's erosive potential, my collaborator and I performed in character as the wind and the water, inviting audience members into a game whose outcome determined how we would collectively act to alter the "landscape" of the textiles. The textiles themselves were naturally dyed with mineral pigments made from rocks collected along the Gila River.
The piece is a collaboration with sofía méndez subieta.
The sound that surrounds is a sculptural sound piece investigating the idea of chance, trust, and control. It grew out of learning about spider species that move around by casting a strand of their silk to the wind and letting it carry them, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of miles. This resonated as akin to human migration stories—not always having a lot of control over where you might end up or what will await you there. The idea of a spider weaving a web and waiting to see what might get caught feels similar as well, each of these decisions fitting within the idea of trust and chance: being as intentional as you can with the information you have, but knowing that there are always factors outside of your control.
The piece contains seven speakers, each playing a track of a seven-channel audio piece. The audio content changes with each installation and is centered around the idea of what gets lost in long distance communication with loved ones: the soundscape of background activities and noises that can’t be translated or communicated.
Once upon a future: Sensory storytelling is a series of workshops done in collaboration with Alyssa Frye, an herbalist and food justice activist. We were both similarly interested in the power of words spoken aloud to create soundwaves that reverberate and create ripples through the world, especially when being given to a listener through the intentional telling of a story.
Stories are often told in the past tense, but the idea for the workshop came about from an interest in what could happen when we tell stories about the present or future, when we harness the power of sound waves to shape future events rather than just reinforce past ones. The resulting workshops ask participants to bring a story that they start off by sharing with the group. We then workshop the stories together, doing movement and sensing exercises to help us to tell our stories in the present tense with language that brings in the body and senses.
I curated a series of events at A Garden…, an outdoor experimental art garden at the Albuquerque Museum. The garden space is activated each year by a group of Art & Ecology students, of which I was part for the 2021 growing season. The theme that we decided on was The Living Room, with the intention to create a space of rest and refuge, inviting visitors of the museum and passersby to sit and spend time in. We planted a mix of medicinal, edible, and dye plants as well as designed a series of hay bale furniture with coverings of woven wool felt strips. I was the summer caretaker to the garden, tending to the space and its plants throughout the season, and curating an event series to activate the garden throughout the month of August.
The events consisted of three workshops as well as a one-night outdoor exhibition in the garden. The three events were a plant walk, a circus workshop, and a storytelling workshop, each of which was done in partnership with a local culture worker or organization working with the theme of healing through embodied connection to plants. For the exhibition, Permission to rest, I invited and worked with a group of MFA students from the University of New Mexico to create site-specific works responding to the garden and its plants.