Artist: Joanna Wierzbicka
Title: Earthworm Fantasies
Curator: Urte Janus
Text: Urte Janus
Venue: Project Octagon, Anglican Chapel, Nunhead Cemetery, London
The ground beneath the city is warped with tunnel systems, some likely begun in prehistoric times, connecting to medieval passageways and intersecting with modern sewage networks and underground train tracks. During heavy rainfall, parts of this subterranean world flood, rainwater sweeping debris from the city streets into its unknown underworld. Some of the tunnels lead to chambers with beds carved into soft carboniferous limestone, underground churches and chapels chiselled by hand by the faithful servants of a prehistoric god. These are painted in red and yellow plant dyes, with drawings of extinct beasts pierced by sharp flint spearheads beneath the caverns of forgotten, soft-stone architecture.
The underground cathedrals are now home to all sorts of outcasts, thinkers, anarchists, and political runaways seeking refuge in the subterranean realm. This is where we gather each full moon to perform rituals of growth and multiplication, pulled by lunar gravity. We cannot be named as individuals, for we are many. You cannot name a multitude.
Of these underground insides, the lining is soft, like a newborn’s mouth, coated in fat drained from dinners into domestic kitchen sinks. New amalgamations of matter ferment in seeping, bubbling, fizzy fluid. Voices of the dead speak as they are transformed into an ever-growing, multiplying primordial soup. We are the soft membranes lining the walls of these tunnels, deposits of waste metabolised by wild yeasts and microbial mats, oozing from the ceilings in soft, jelly-like stalagmites. Empires vanish beneath our skin, a diversity of cells figuring out what form to take next. In decay, the powers of law, state, and religion break down and ferment into the nutritious broth that feeds underground root systems. The misadventures of matter begin in the soft gut lining of an earthworm.
To give this a soundtrack: imagine trickling water, subterranean rivers, discarded words and drunken cries bouncing off walls thinned by water erosion. It is not easy to stay sober with ideas too dangerous for a hegemonic society. Hidden in the caverns of prehistoric shrines, these words coat pieces of rubbish that refuse to decompose, waiting to be flushed back to street level by the next heavy rainfall.
Love dwells in the dampness as we digest, as the gravity of the full moon makes us amorous and willing to expand. Ambient auditory hallucinations are likely in the presence of toxic mould that feeds on bodily fluids laced with unknown chemical amalgamations. Tremors are induced by passing trains. The bloated underground stomach releases steam through street potholes.
If water has memory, does it remember every body it has passed through? The soft, salty entrails of prehistoric trilobites, the mouths of dictators, the intestines of the city. Does it know what is coming as it bathes the cells of newly mutated multicellular beings, as it is purified in treatment plants and putrefied in heaps of compost, as it shifts and swirls into the clouds?