Santiago Morilla
Humusidades proposes a slow immersion into the living fabric of the soil as a space of coexistence between life and death. The work rehearses a politics of attention that runs counter to the economy of spectacle, inviting us to inhabit slowness and to listen to the invisible rhythms of matter and its transformations.
Filmed in regenerative orchards, mushroom farms, logging sites, and industrial monocultures, the project traces an affective topography of land use, from the domestic to the industrial. Sound, captured through contact microphones and deep geophones, acts as a subterranean narrator; the music, generated from the electrical data of plants and fungi, returns to the landscape its own inner vibration.
Humusidades reflects on the need to coexist with that which dies and to allow it to decompose in the shared ground: ideas, bodies, systems. Decomposition appears not as an end but as fertile labour, evoking the possibility that every ruin may contain a form of rebirth. Ultimately, how we understand the soil—the humus from which we come and to which we will return—will shape our future on this planet.
Santiago Morilla
A multidisciplinary artist awarded the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, he specialised in New Media Art at the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design Helsinki. He teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate level at the Faculty of Fine Arts (UCM) and is part of several research groups related to art, technology, and contemporary culture, as well as the R&D project Energy Humanities (CSIC).
His practice operates at the intersection of contemporary art, (post)nature, and situated technologies, with a particular focus on eco-critical art, public interventions, interspecies communication, and data visualisation.
His work has been exhibited in international institutions such as The Drawing Center (New York), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (South Korea), Fondazione Pastificio Cerere (Rome), Museo ABC (Madrid), and Centre Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona), among others. He has received numerous research and production grants and awards, including the Spanish Academy in Rome and international programmes across Europe and South Korea.
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