Grounding ~ Seeding

Exhibition project

Marwa Arsanios, Chto Delat, Kitti Gosztola & Bence György Pálinkás, Francisco Huichaqueo, Saodat Ismailova, Amanda Piña, Emília Rigová

Curated by:
Judit Angel, Alessandra Pomarico, Borbála Soós, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

29.04. – 15.07.2022
Opening: 29 April 2022, 6 - 9 p.m.

Venue: tranzit.sk, Beskydská 12, Bratislava
Open: Tuesday – Friday: 2:30 – 6:30 p.m.


A World of Many Worlds
A New Program

This spring, tranzit.sk is starting a new multi-year program based on a critique of the Anthropocene, which regards today’s multiple crisis as also being a cultural crisis, the result of modern, colonial, capitalist and patriarchal paradigms that have erased/endangered other forms of life and ways of knowing, being and relating. Since education is essential for bringing about an increasingly urgent systemic change in society, our new program builds on the pedagogical potential of art practices and their advocacy for a more just, ecologically sound and relationally connected world. At large, the program explores four major issues and their interconnection: the current social, political and environmental crises; modernity and decoloniality; embodied, collaborative practices of knowledge production; and the politics of everyday life.

The program’s title stems from the often-quoted demand of the Zapatistas, the insurgent Indigenous people from Chiapas (Mexico) who for 40 years have been striving to build a ‘world in which many worlds fit.’ We share their vision of a world based on horizontal, inclusive and equitable relations, where all forms of knowledge are considered valuable.

A World of Many Worlds rearticulates the relationship between tranzit.sk’s research, curatorial and educational activities by building a flexible and porous space characterized by circular communication. The newly established learning station fulfills several functions: part library, research and learning lab, part display for art projects, it will host lectures, seminars, workshops, conversations and participatory activities. It will also serve as a living archive of objects and relations present in the neighborhood, a seedbed for further projects involving artists, practitioners and local residents.

Grounding ~ Seeding

How can we unlearn the violent and destructive paradigms of colonial, racial, patriarchal capitalism, and imagine a world in which different knowledge systems are equally valuable and cooperate to defend life in all its forms?

These are central questions addressed by the exhibition and learning space Grounding ~ Seeding, the first project in the series of tranzit.sk’s new program. Assuming the exhibition’s inaugural character, the curatorial approach refers to the program’s main directions, namely the intertwined causes and effects of today’s systemic crisis and the urgent need to figure out strategies for overcoming and repair. This manifests through the work of artists reinforcing collective regenerative processes and proposing prefigurative scenarios for building social infrastructures in support of wider ecosystems.

Sharing ancestral knowledge, land-based practices, feminist initiatives, and reflections around commoning, evoking a sense of interrelatedness, reciprocity, response-ability, care for our shared future and that of the next generations – the artists featured in the exhibition are driven from within decolonial perspectives and/or Indigenous experiences, building on the legacy of social and emancipatory movements. Suggesting a necessary systemic and structural change, in multiple ways and from their situated positions, the artists denounce and poetically reverse the effects of the ongoing processes of erasure, abuse and destruction. Instead, they encourage a critique and reorientation of our sensibilities towards gestures of repair, the politics of care and examples of self-sufficient micro-economies.

Through their works and poetics, the artists call for an end to extraction and the commodification of life. They envision a new, different relationship to the natural world and to society by conveying the potency of dreams, ceremonies, and old and new rituals. They transmit their spiritual and political experience for a world in which many worlds can fit.

Thus, Grounding ~ Seeding is a way to commit, through exhibition making, to laying the foundations for a long-term trajectory of epistemological reconstruction, and seeding decolonial ideas and gestures toward a different future, one that looks at several generations before and after ours.

Grounding ~ Seeding is the result of the collaboration of four curators: educator, curator and writer Alessandra Pomarico (Lecce/New York), researcher and curator Borbala Soos (London), philosopher and writer Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu (Chişinău/Copenhagen) and curator and tranzit.sk’s director Judit Angel (Bratislava/Budapest). The elaboration of tranzit.sk’s long-term program and its inaugural exhibition has been an overlapping process informed by mutual inspiration, experience sharing and collective caring.

ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit. Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.