Topsoil, 2026
Video, Stereo Sound, 3’12”
A dead stag beetle (Lucanus cervus) lies suspended within a stroboscopic field. Not buried, not preserved, but held in suspension.
Around it, hands enter and withdraw. Their fingernails are extended with pinecone petals, forming surfaces that are both ornamental and invasive. They touch soil, reposition organic and digital matter. Each gesture is precise, contained, and inconclusive. Nothing resolves. The action circles without arriving.
The beetle does not settle into meaning, nor fully into the image as a body. It resists becoming specimen or symbol, remaining instead a point of friction, something approached, adjusted, but not absorbed.
Movement fractures under a pulsing rhythm. Continuity collapses into intervals; time stalls, thickens, disperses. The viewer is held inside a sequence of imminent actions that never complete. Within this field, the gesture of looking oscillates between care and control, delicacy and intrusion. The beetle’s armoured, antlered form, coded as force, display, and dominance, is met by movements that are meticulous, adorned, and unstable TOPSOIL remains at the threshold where touch precedes consequence, and where the surface of the earth is not an end, but an active, shifting boundary.
Created in collaboration with Josuè Azor. Sensor-based sound by Levent Pinarci. Ambient composition by Andriy K.