In our soil, the living and the dead, the natural and the artificial, the analog and the digital are compressed, forming a geological and infrastructural chimera between archaeological archive and sentimental sediments.

When starting their residency at Charim x Factory in a former industrial bakery close to the former grounds of the world’s largest brick manufacturers Wienerberger, artists Alessandro Samuel Albrecht, Laia Fabre and Katarina Spielmann - who never collaborated before - simply started digging. The dig was ambivalent: It wasn’t entirely clear whether it would unearth, bury something, or do both in the process. What emerged was a space of an arcane communal rite, a site of uncertainty and exploration, and a mine for the extraction of ideas.

SOIL GENESIS didn’t produce Fine Art, but rather created a new discipline we could call "Dirty Art", reminiscent both of its land art ancestors and the forensic eco art we witness in the Anthropocene. The artists became laborers and archaeologists alike while studying and learning how to burn bricks from clay. Digging through archives they recovered historical bricks with the immortal Wienerberger eagle sigil, witnesses to the urban and industrial past of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the outskirts of Vienna once again became the site of large scale industrial production - they had already been in Roman times, when the immense clay reservoirs were first discovered and systematically used.

In their elementary composition, the bricks once burned are also a testament to an artistic collaboration forged from trust, forming a foundation for a solid commons of theory and practice. Both site-specific and poly-locational, the practice of working with clay, brick making and ceramics is also a temporal link to historiographies which started with the earliest forms of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing and early architecture in many cultures around the globe many thousands of years ago. Experimenting with a variety of brick-making techniques, Spielmann, Fabre and Albrecht slowly and meticulously transform both the inside and outside of Charim x Factory, entangling material and architectural dimensions and time scales in the process.

Wet - hot - dry - cold: SOIL GENESIS ultimately is a study in elemental media. States of aggregation and the transitions between them are the invisible narratives we should direct our attention to when experiencing the exhibition. What about the air’s humidity today? What does the piece of clay dug up outside tell us about the weather centuries ago? How hot is the kiln and how much energy did the artists employ to excavate the plot outside? What is the smell of the drying wet soil on the columns inside? How is history formed: Is it a discovery of ancient ruins, a reading of what once was there? Or is the past created, constructed and construed, a simulation of something that never was? The bricks of SOIL GENESIS are mental elements of the building blocks of a reality the mortar of which is art.

- Text by Univ.-Prof. Paul Feigelfeld

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On view until 08.12.24, don’t miss!

Open by appointment
Please contact @alessandroxsamuel | @kata_spielmann | @laiiafabrre
Katarina Spielmann (M: 00436766266360) 
Alessandro Samuel Albrecht (E: albrecht.alessandro@hotmail.com)