Painting the Ground Artistic and Ethnographic Encounters on Soil

Why do we acknowledge only our textual sources but not the ground we walk on? Asks anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011) in one of his most important works. The anthropologist Christine Moderbacher and the artist Lenia Hauser aim to answer to this claim by focusing on the ground beneath our feet: while Lenia Hauser uses her artistic methods to approach geographical structures which do not reveal whether they show a distant or nearby environment, a landscape or even an organism, Christine Moderbacher looks at but also beyond reactionary ideas of “soil,” questioning what it means to be attached to and engage with the ground - both as a living organism and as a concrete experience of people’s attachment to the soil they live on/with. By zooming in on different artistic and anthropological engagements with the ground, the paper answers to renewed scholarly attention to soil (e.g. Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) and its spatial depth. Drawing from shared fieldwork in Halle’s currently excavated main square, as well as collaborative teaching at the local Art School, it reflects on using painting as an ethnographic research method and discuss its potential benefits and flaws. Based on common exhibitions and publications, the project “Painting the ground. Artistic and ethnographic reflections on soil” seeks to advance the dialog between art and anthropology through combining ethnographic field research and artistic tools of representation.