Image 2 for Carved to Flow

For the second event that takes place in Otobong Nkanga’s laboratory installation in Athens under the guise of a Public Program exploring the mentality of ritual in resource consumption, we welcome Jennifer Teets and Lorenzo Cirrincione’s Elusive Earths—– a joint research and evolving hybrid production surrounding the practice of clays with forgotten origins, largely centered on geophagy—the ingestion of edible soils, across the globe, and in an archeological depth of time. Since 2014, the research has looked at terra sigillata, terra preta, and pan de tierra bendita, among other rare clays, spanning an expansive geography from the small island of Lemnos in Greece, to Colombia, to Oaxaca, Mexico. As a preamble to Elusive Earths IV, it returns to Athens, Greece, by way of Lemnos, to take further inventory of ingestible clays and the imaginaries created around them; to look further at our vested belief in their truth, so as to ruminate on potent pharmacological convictions in an effort to expose a point of vulnerability within an economy seeking to commodify the longing for a cure