Soft Matter in Interwoven Worlds

Soft Matter in Interwoven Worlds is a project attempting to shed light on hidden narratives surrounding the potato, with the intention of getting a new insight on how we can reconnect and embrace nature.

To me, a "Soft Matter" is an overlooked entity, seen as unheroic and taken for granted due to its omnipresence. Instead of reducing the potato to a mere nurturer, I see it as a resilient carrier of life as well as a creature.  I saw a multiplicity within the potato to be discovered.

A family archival photo revealing that my great-great grandfather cultivated potato fields , inspired me to further research in territories and time, as well as retracing the tuber’s journey it took from Peru, its birthplace and my heritage, to Switzerland, my second place of origin. From here on I approached this project in an atlas way of thinking, collecting family archives and simultaneously visiting virtually and physically crucial places and people regarding the potato, documenting and creating new personal archives. The booklet „Retracings of Soft Encounters“ showcases the potatoes journey through the micro perspective of my family and me. The jounrey it takes to grow, from planting, harvesting to storing it, while inspecting those steps in the context of the potatoes contemporary habitat in Switzerland, but also in its ancestral space in Peru. Working in a sort of personal diary, honouring ancestral and generational knowledge.

To stop the growth and germination of potatoes, green light is used in storage warehouses. Pink light is generally used to enhance growth. I move/shift within the spectrum of these lights, moving between growth and silence. 

In a second phase of this project I asked myself what or who is the potato to me? As it is its own source of life, its own seed, I see it is as a resilient carrier of life, shapeshifting parallelly to myself. In this part I reappropriate the tuber, it alows me to talk about growing up as a bicultural women. About the experience of being a baby, becoming a child, a teen to a woman.  This transitions always felt very blurry to me and I don’t think there is a linear growth of transition, I believe these stages exist within one another constantly. The potato becomes a nurturer in birthing my identity, beyond family ties, inviting me to explore myself as a multiple, healing and reconnecting. The boundaries between endings and beginnings blur as I navigate between the ambiguity of birth, growth, death, and loss. Bringing me back to the roots of it all and leaving me to wonder:

Have I been breeding you, or have you been birthing me?