Ivana Lazić: saturated soils

• Indoor
• Installation
• Sculpture
• 18th district
• Until November 12

Ivana Lazić's saturated soils begins with a garden in the village of Vojska in Serbia. Her grandmother tends it. Her mother and aunt tend it. Three women, across time, sustaining the same ground. The work asks what happens when a body eats from soil it has tended — when the distinction between what is outside and what is inside, between cultivation and embodiment, begins to dissolve.

The Material Continuum

The project establishes what Lazić calls a "material continuum" between bodies, soils, plants, and temporalities. Inheritance here is not a single transfer but an ongoing process of incorporation and transformation. The body that eats from the garden is already implicated in its material histories. It absorbs the soil through the plants and their fruits. It is itself subject to continuous exchanges — absorption, digestion, the reworking of matter that exceeds any fiction of bodily autonomy.

What is cultivated outside the body is continuously reworked within it. The distinction between environment and organism, between cultivation and embodiment, becomes unstable.

Care and Saturation

The work also proposes a different model of time. The practices embedded in cultivation suggest continuity based on care and sufficiency rather than extraction and excess. Patient observation of natural cycles. Respectful harvesting for growth. The embedded temporality and repetitive performativity of maintaining and caring for the garden are essential to the project.

Saturation, in this sense, points to accumulated human impact — the deep embodiment of care labour in every molecule of tended soil. It is both a material fact and an emotional one.

The Workshop

On Saturday, October 31, Lazić leads a workshop titled Decolonising Botany #2. It begins with a text written by her aunt about the plants in the grandmother's garden — stories that weave human emotions and desires into the lives of plants, granting them personhood and folkloric significance. Participants read marked passages from selected texts, uncovering how colonial infrastructures are embedded in our memories and perceptions of the plant world. The second part uses eco-printing: fresh or dried plant materials pressed onto fabric. Participants will use rose petals collected from the family garden in Serbia to create prints on cotton bandage, which become sculptural pieces in the exhibition.

Working language is English. Duration 3 hours. Limited to 5–15 people.