When the Ground Becomes Transparent is a lecture-performance structured in three interconnected moments: a screening, a reading, and a live performative intervention. The work presents Elena Mazzi's artistic research on extractivism, landscape, and more-than-human agency in the Arctic region, with a particular focus on Iceland, where the Polar Silk Road trade route is currently under negotiation, and on Sweden, where ongoing mining activities have led to the relocation of the entire city of Kiruna.
The performance begins with the screening of the video currently on view in the exhibition Contracts of Recognitions, followed by an artist reading that creates a bridge toward the live performance. This second moment brings together recorded thermal camera images, overlaid with words and small gestures, emerging from a ritual developed in collaboration with a group of Sami shamans. At a site where the town's main church had stood for more than a century, the group interrogated the ground, the soil about their feelings in relation to how humans are operating, exploiting the soil for profit, not listening to their voices, screaming loud not to extract anymore. In fact, the city of Kiruna, together with the local mining company, decided to activate the relocation of the entire city to allow more extraction in the near future.
As a closing gesture of the exhibition Contracts of Recognitions, this performance situates itself within a broader curatorial reflection on alliance, property, and representation. It extends the exhibition's inquiry into forms of recognition that move beyond exclusively human-centred frameworks, while further exploring the fragile alliances that are possible.
Duration: Approximately 30 minutes.
