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


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inearth/unearth

2023




Documentation video of twenty-nine film burial locations and experiences. Single-channel video, 11:38.


16mm film mailed to and from thirty-three pairs of human-soil collaborators, spliced and digitized. Single-channel video, 2:53.


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 around the world, 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.

Almost all soils aren’t fully formed in the place they’re found but contain accumulations of particles from many different places carried by the wind and the water. Similarly, the experience of living between soils both physically and emotionally is a common one in the times we’re inhabiting. My own creative landscape over the past three years of living in Albuquerque had been shaped both by the high desert soils I’d been living on/in/with, and by the people I’ve been in relation with. Each of the collaborators i invited to join me in this project has nourished and inspired me through their friendship, creative practices, and/or general ways of living and relating to the world. These qualities in them have been in turn been shaped by the many soils they’ve each moved through, laid on, appreciated, tended to, connected with, and been nourished by. This work asks how we can look to soil as a model for carrying an ever-expanding collection of homes, stories, ideas, and loved ones within us, while also doing the work to gently sift through and decide what to care for and what to let break down.


Collaborators:

Adelaide Theriault, Tony Theriault, & Argos

Alanna Lynch

an emard

Breanne Johnson

Gin LaBoy

J. Michael Ford

Jessica Metz

Leo Williams

Marcella Ernest

Miguel Novelo

Priya Subberwal

Ranran Fan

sofía méndez subieta

Stephanie J. Woods

Adrien Guadagnino & Nico Valdez


Alisha Anderson

Beth Hansen

Cebastien & Robin

Isabel Edreva

Jeanette Hart-Mann

Joelle Mercedes

Madeleine Stearns

Mary Tsiongas

Nadia & Laura Edreva & Hristo Edrev

Rachel Bordeleau

SaraNoa Mark

Sean Nash & Lori Spoozak

Vivien Cahn


© Eleonora Edreva 2025