Untertage, by artist collective Troika (Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel, Eva Rucki), is part ecosystemic fiction, part re-telling of an alternative geoscientific history, staged in two parts across two locations: ‘To see a world through a grain of salt’, on view at OMR and ‘No sound of water’ at Arte Abierto, Mexico City.

The title Untertage – literally ‘beneath the day’ – means ‘underground’ and, in German, refers to the subterranean absence of daylight in the context of the mining industry. The title alludes to how time and place are intimately connected, while speculating on the origins and the ultimate demise of mankind.

The overarching narrative circles in on the question: What if salt, the first substance mined by man, in the form of flint, had an agency and vitality in and of itself?

What if you started thinking of salt in terms of its own entity that has acquired consciousness and instrumentalised humans to raise it from the ground, to dominate Earth and populate it with its own kind – salt not as a dead material but a natural form that has since the dawn of its existence manipulated humankind into submission?

What if, since millennia, salt has wilfully disrupted and shaped human agency by enabling technological advancement, from the making of the first flint tool all the way to the invention of modern day silicon computer chip?

‍

UNTERTAGE

No Sound of Water

Solo exhibition presented at Arte Abierto Foundation, Mexico City

NOV.12.2021 - MAY.15.2022

To see a world through a grain of salt

Solo exhibition presented at Galeria OMR, Mexico City

SEP.08.2021 - DEC.18.2021