2024 - ongoing / The Cleanest Touch
The Cleanest Touch is between our skin and Earth’s skin. Together they create a texture imprint through rest and gravity, a collaborative graphic art by us and the ground beneath us. The photos are the visible trace of an immersive, contemplative process.
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I started this project partly as a practice of self-healing from a chronic condition that I've been dealing with for the past four years, and partly as a pure exploration of my perception of the threshold between my body and the surrounding landscape. Soon after, I extended it into a guided immersive process, inviting participants, through verbal poetic cues and questions, to gradually come home to ground, let go of anything that keeps them away from the earth, and bond with gravity as the love force between us and our planet.
Many of us feel a profound grief over a culture that has largely lost sight of our connection to the Earth, forgetting that we are as much a part of our planet as the gentle winds and the contours of the landscape. Our world has shifted from a felt sense of kinship and reciprocity to a perception of the great Earth surrounding us as something separate, liveless and dirty.
The Cleanest Touch is about awakening what already lies within: the memory of living in kinship with a living Earth. It invites us to lift the veil of our forgetfulness and hold the Earth in our hearts with love.
Andrea Olsen says, "Body is our first environment, it is the medium through which we know the earth." In the Bible, to know signifies the most intimate physical and sensorial connection: knowing someone encompasses procreation, eros, and the creative force of nature. True knowing is not merely a cognitive process; it involves all our senses, the very senses through which we are embedded in this world.
The immersive, contemplative process behind the photographs allows this awakening to become a lived experience, ensuring it is not forgotten. The fundamental ancient truth of our belonging is remembered not as a philosophy or a set of principles, but as something that is felt, touched, smelled—something that is embodied within us and permeates us from the inside out.
Thus, The Cleanest Touch is between our skin and Earth’s skin. The ground is not dirty; it is nourishing. Our material existence sprouts from the soil, through which we are the siblings of all living beings. Our bodies are soil in the process of getting nourished by the larger whole, which we, in turn, nourish. This reflects our innate, natural generosity—an essence we cannot escape but can deepen through presence and awareness. The generosity of deeply resting in the act of offering our bodies as a landscape for the more-than-human mirrors how a tree serves as a landscape for us.
Our skin knowing the earth’s skin creates an imprint of textures through deep rest and gravity - a collaborative graphic art by us and the ground beneath us.
The terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within the terrain. (David Abram)
