Eva Garibaldi
about
projects
- The Stones Only Appear To Be Non-Living
- Fantastic Glitch Swamp
- Salinarum
- To Be Like Water
- Shifting Ecologies
- The Unstable Ground
- Pillnitz Chronotopes Tour
Swamp_Matter, audio-visual immersive installation, mixed media sculptures
Countless drops carve underground cavities into a mass of limestone – rituals, graves, shelters at the gates to the underground – an explorer’s descent into the dark mouth of a cave – smooth wet surfaces wind into the unknown depth – sediments, speleothems, draperies, columns, rimstone pools – carbide lamps, electricity, concrete – ultrasonic bat screeches – floods, alluvium, blowholes – the river disappears into the underworld with deafening noise.
The Stones Only Appear to Be Non-Living explores karst caves as living archives, porous spaces shaped by climate, water, sediment, and time. The project reflects on deep geological time, climate shifts, and more-than-human temporalities, positioning the river as the central narrator. The installation stages the instability of seemingly solid ground and opens space for non-anthropocentric narratives of climate and landscape. What appears solid and inert is revealed as porous and alive — shaped by mineral flows, water rhythms, and deep-time ecologies.
In the framework of deep geological time, the seemingly eternal, atmospherically stable and petrified cave is an environment of flux. As a primordial heterotopy that combines the opposites of the living and the non-living, the known and the unknown, permanence and transitions, the ancient past and a distant future, it represents a glitch in the history of appropriating natural environments – an unrecognisable, uneven and changeable area that resists clear boundaries and dividing lines, even to the surface.
A zone of constant percolation into the depths, opening up ever new inaccessible areas, and a simultaneous constant accumulation of sediments and overground material is formed by the Reka River, which, in the installation, becomes a vessel for the heterochronic narrative of the underground. The passage between various dimensions of the river – from droplets to the ponor – is channelled by sound, which dissolves bodies and guides them underground.
Hyperlocalised and fragmented artefacts erode the image of a non-living and permanent landscape, outlining a new, unknown and onto-epistemologically open terrain. They open a new area of sensitivity that emphasises the instability of our own ground in the wake of the depths of the Earth’s crust, from which the horror of the Planet as an indifferent, unrepresentable and uncontrollable world-without-us leaks.
Authors: Swamp_Matter (Eva Garibaldi, Ana Laura Richter)
Curator: Maja Burja
Sound: Ida Hiršenfelder (beepblip)
Narration: Lucy Rose Albert, Ana Laura Richter, Eva Garibaldi
Ceramics: Ana Ščuka
Programming: Jernej Koprivnikar
Scientific Advisory: Škocjan Caves Public Service Agency, Slovenia (Borut Peric, Polona Kovačič, Borut Lozej, Tomaž Smerdelj, dr. Rosana Cerkvenik, Marko Požar), Karst Research Institute, ZRC SAZU (Matej Blatnik)
Photos: Domen Pal/Aksioma
The use of research equipment for 3D capture of the cave was made possible by ZRC SAZU as part of the project “Development of research infrastructure for the international competitiveness of the Slovenian RRI space – RI-SI-EPOS”, supported by the Republic of Slovenia, the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, and the European Regional Development Fund.
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2024
Part of the U30+ production programme for supporting young artists.
Financial support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana, Stimulerings Fonds Creative Industrie NL, and Škocjan Caves Public Service Agency, Slovenia