How To Speak About The Earth

Series of large canvas paintings, 160 x 330 cm

„The concept of “nature” now appears as a truncated, simplified, exaggeratedly moralistic, excessively polemical, and prematurely political version of the otherness of the world to which we must open ourselves if we are not to become collectively mad – alienated, let us say. To sum it up rather too quickly: for Westerners and those who have imitated them, “nature” has made the world uninhabitable.“

— Bruno Latour

How To Speak About The Earth is a series of large-scale paintings (160 × 330 cm) that explores the complex and often contradictory relationship between humans and the living world. Drawing inspiration from the writings of Bruno Latour, the works question the long-standing separation of nature and culture and instead propose a reality shaped by entanglement, reciprocity and continuous transformation.

The paintings do not depict landscapes in a conventional sense. Rather, they create expansive visual fields in which geological structures, traces, textures and layered gestures merge into speculative terrains. Sedimentation, erosion and accumulation become painterly processes that mirror the slow temporalities of the Earth while revealing the fragility of human systems of control and categorization.

„There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world. But, by taking care, we can cure ourselves of believing that we do not belong to it, that the essential question lies elsewhere, that what happens to the world does not concern us.“

— Bruno Latour

Latour’s reflections on ecology and the impossibility of standing outside the world resonate throughout the series. If we can no longer imagine ourselves as detached observers, then new forms of attention and new ways of speaking become necessary. The paintings respond to this challenge by replacing fixed narratives with ambiguity, material presence and open-ended interpretation.

„We can no longer say “this, too, will pass.” We’re going to have to get used to it. It’s definitive.“

— Bruno Latour

Instead of presenting nature as an object to be represented or mastered, How To Speak About The Earth approaches it as an active, dynamic force with which we are inevitably intertwined. The works invite viewers to reconsider their own position within these networks of relation and to imagine forms of coexistence that move beyond inherited dualisms toward a more attentive and shared understanding of the planet.

„The difficulty lies in the very expression “relation to the world,” which presupposes two sorts of domains, that of nature and that of culture, domains that are at once distinct and impossible to separate completely.“

— Bruno Latour