Necrology: Becoming Soil

Sharples’ curatorial project NECROLOGY, functioned as both exhibition and practice-led study—a speculative site of mourning offering an interface with absences, transitions, rituals, suspensions, shrines, and exhumations. The exhibition speculated on material afterlives, ecological grief, and the economies and systems of death(care) and loss.

As part of the exhibition, Sharples invited haptonomic professional Rosalie Bak to facilitate Becoming Soil—a participatory workshop situated between the exhibition space and the burial grounds of St Mary’s in Wirksworth. In Becoming Soil, living human bodies came together to co-sense what it is like to relate to non/living matters and materialities. Drawing on principles from the field of Haptonomy (the practice and study of human relationality and the phenomena of touch) participants were invited to make way for a more sensorial encounter with body, soil and death-care. Unfolding in three parts: ‘Noticing’, ‘Being with/in’, ‘Fermenting’, the creative and somatic exercises played with themes such as tenderness, intentionality, attention and affective touch, while also engaging with the exhibition space, works and surrounding landscapes. An audio-recording with site-specific meditation further guided participants to creep, leak and flow through all surrounding material, temporal, fleshy and microbial entanglements after which they gathered in a process of collective processing of the experience. The ink that was used in the creation of the collective work was made from the ferments of decomposing organic matter.

Guided by New Materialist thought and developed in collaboration with the New Materialist Reading/Research Group (NMRG) and Playing Fields – two artist-led curatorial initiatives – NECROLOGY foregrounds the curatorial as a method of critical analysis and ontological mediation. Calling on Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of an affirmative ethics of mourning, Sharples cultivates a space in which death and loss are recognised as generative, and in a continual process of becoming. Rather than a static presentation of objects, NECROLOGY unfolds as a field of relational intensities, where curatorial practice closes the space between academic discourse and embodied artistic processes.

Curated by Victoria Sharples at Haarlem Artspace in partnership with New Materialist Reading/Research Group (NMRG) & Playing Fields.
Supported by the AHE Academic Theme Funding, University of Derby.