Filipp Groubnov

The soil before you was brought from the Belarusian village Zhirovichi, my grandparents’ village, collected near the Spring of Holy Water.
“Pochva” teems with life. It harbors billions of living beings, remnants of a distant landscape. The organisms within the soil breathe, feed, metabolize. Their vitality generates electrical charge.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I haven’t returned to Belarus. My grandparents’ village, along with its Holy Spring, exists now only in memory. This memory—a collective hallucination of a promised land – exists on a different temporal scale, simultaneously near and distant, eternally.
A memory-land, a promise, a longing. The earthy matter, “pochva,” hums with the unheard sounds of life.
These animated vibrations of matter inspire dreams and desires. Through digits, executable rituals take the form of a code, reconstructing a landscape from my memory, existing somewhere between imagination and reality.
A dream of soil matter, a promised land embedded within physical substance.

Bio: Filipp Groubnov is an interdisciplinary artist born in Belarus in 1995. He lived there until 2015 when he moved to the Netherlands to pursue a career in art. Drawing from his academic background in science – he studied in the physics faculty of Belarusian State University – Groubnov’s work is influenced by his fascination with biological systems and their connection to human symbolism.