Iryna Loskot

In 2025, in the village of Ivanivka in the Sumy region (Ukraine), my grandmother passed away. At that time, I was in Kyiv (Ukraine). Unable to find a way or the financial means to come on the day of the funeral, I arrive a day late. I am no longer traveling to a funeral, but to a garden with the things she left behind. All forms of care eventually come down to the gesture of walking: leaving, returning, fermenting/meandering. As I tend to the garden, I think about tending to a sick body. In both processes, daily return and repetition matter. Reflecting on lateness as one of the temporalities of wartime, I weave together sound recordings from the garden and my work within it: last year’s with this year’s, trying to grasp a new understanding of time. My grandmother’s illness stood in opposition to the rhythms of air-raid alerts and news, and thus fell out of visible time. Drawing on Sandilands’ ideas, I think of illness as a process in which a body becomes a landscape of catastrophe, yet no one sees this catastrophe because it unfolds on a different scale. Observing the scale of my loved ones’ pain, I become increasingly aware of death as a prolonged process of disorientation in the space of both the living and the non-living. During decomposition, the first to emerge from the body are gases and fluids. The molecules of these fluids split and bind at once, and if a person, as a meaning within the world of signs, is constantly being reassembled through relationships, then I look at the choreography of the liquid molecules as a possibility for reconfiguring human–nonhuman relations into an entirely different (non)form. When these fluids seep into the soil, a shared fermentation begins. When I think about the future, I think about gardens without humans and without fluids. This exhibition invites you into its fermentation.