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
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.