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-
2023Oats are a plant that provides medicine to both humans and soil. They are commonly planted as a cover crop to protect and provide nutrients to exhausted soils, and the milky stage of oats is a magical few day window in which the immature oat seeds create a milky sap that when tinctured creates a powerful medicine for the nervous system, helping with many conditions too present in life under late capitalism: constant stress, exhaustion and burnout, anxiety, grief, addiction, etc.
re- started from a personal pull towards milky oat medicine and spiraled outwards from there. After I told my mom that I was thinking about growing oats to make a milky oat tincture, she laughed and told me that our matrilineal ancestors farmed oats. This new depth of relationship with the oats felt especially potent because my maternal grandma had recently passed away. The memories she had been living in most near the end of her life were of tending to the house and yard she shared with her mom and sister as a child, before the state (Bulgarian communist regime) had taken their home and forced them to move to an apartment building, severing their relationship to soil, land, and the practice of growing food.
The piece 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.
These artifacts were held up in the exhibition by soil pedestals, which are also an important part of the work of re-. The collective nature of the soil pedestals served as the invitational counterpoint to the intimacy of planting the oats. While the planting ritual created an embodied re-connection to soil within the context of my familial lineage, the pedestals created a spectrum of invitations for people to have their own embodied experience with soil. They were collectively built through a pedestal building party during installation week and collectively deconstructed at the exhibition’s closing, when I did an interactive performance in which the audience and I broke them apart, with everyone present taking some of the soil home with them. One mold remained in the back of the gallery throughout the span of the show, presenting an active invitation to visitors to get their hands in the soil and participate in the shared building.
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.
Outside the Gallery-
1. Created a weaving adapted from an eighty year old kitchen cloth woven by my maternal great-grandma.
2. A ritual planting of oats in my backyard, the oat seeds planted to grow through the weaving.
3. Cared for the oats as they grew.
4. Harvested the oats at their milky stage to tincture and gift to people who supported the project.
Inside the Gallery-
1. Artifacts from the oat planting ritual: a piece of the weaving, woven photographs depicting moments from the planting, oat seeds, jars of milky oat tea in anticipation of the milky oat tincture.
2. Soil pedestals built collaboratively, each one holding up one of the oat ritual artifacts.
3. A closing performance in which the people present collectively took apart the soil pedestals and brought the soil home with them.