‘Der Schweiß der Erde’ (Sweat of the Earth): On Memory and the Entanglements with Land

This article presents the artistic research project Der Schweiß der Erde, developed with artist Stephan Thierbach, as a method for engaging the embodied, relational, and tacit dimensions of polluted landscapes that remediation frameworks tend to flatten or obscure. Through collective practices of earth-cooking and “earth sweat” distillation carried out with local constituents, the project stages shared sensory encounters with contaminated soil that activate embodied relations to land shaped by post-socialist transition. Framed as a practice of transmediation, the article shows how treating soil as both material and medium, and mobilising smell as an epistemic force, generates situated forms of knowledge through proximity and shared experience. These sensory encounters register how toxicity persists in and through bodies, articulating relational entanglements that exceed Cartesian dualistic frameworks underpinning environmental clean-up.