
In Greek mythology, Gaia is the primordial mother—giver of breath, of gods, humans, and all living things. In Facing Gaia (2017), Bruno Latour rethinks this ‘Mother Earth,’ proposing Gaia not as a passive backdrop or inert landscape, but as a sentient, reactive agent—an active subject entangled with the crisis of the Anthropocene.
Mirroring ongoing wars, ecological collapses, and social fragmentation of our time, Gaia’s body relentlessly twists and trembles. She sings and screams, endures and survives—within endless cycles of breakdown and renewal, disappearance and return.
How, then, do contemporary artists attune themselves to the gestures of this polyphonic being—and in what ways do they respond? Echoes of Gaia brings together six Berlin and Dakar-based artists whose practices draw from ritual as a source of performative creation.
Conceiving Gaia as a living, pulsing presence, the exhibition explores how artistic expression can resonate with and amplify the Earth’s trembling voice. What have we lost—and what remains to be rediscovered? The participating artists, shaped by diverse cultural lineages, expand ritual practices rooted in everyday life and ancestral traditions into acts of healing, transformation, and mediation.
They intervene in the materiality of nature, channeling repetitive gestures into inner processes, and reframe inherited myths and cultural legacies through the lens of the present to compose new narratives. Their works traverse boundaries between the human and the more-than-human, the visible and the invisible, the past and the future—invoking Gaia’s polyphonic resonance through gesture and sound, memory and matter.
Curated by Keumhwa Kim

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