Never Ground

Never Ground is a video work inspired by science-fiction stories about the underground world and by the most recent scientific discoveries connecting speleological exploration with space exploration. The video is presented as an uninterrupted loop depicting a descent and an ascent through the bowels of a celestial body, tracing a potential space-time journey between the Earth and the underground passages of another planet.
In Never Ground real ecosystems merge with scenes built in the studio, inspired by the way special effects were made in pre-digital science-fiction films, with miniature sets and props. Trejbalová’s research into moving images is closely bound up with her sculptural practice, a central part of how she builds her cinematic imagery. The sculptures made by the artist become the film’s sets, bearing witness to a process in which matter is transformed into image. The video follows the structure of Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), in which the protagonists travel through the interior of the planet, entering its depths through an Icelandic volcano and emerging from Stromboli. The nineteenth-century tale thus conceptually anticipates what future technologies would bring to humanity: the connection between two very distant points on the planet. In recent years underground systems, in particular the lava tubes found on both the Moon and Mars, have become the object of great scientific interest, since they could be the first spaces able to host future human settlements. Meanwhile, recently discovered cave systems on Earth host organisms that have evolved in conditions so particular that they offer clues to possible forms of life in extraterrestrial environments. To address the underground is to confront a series of crucial contemporary questions: the ground we walk on is home to most of our planet’s fauna and, at the same time, to the remains of vanished human civilisations. Digging gives us access to a remote time, even to deep time: this is what happens with the extraction of minerals and hydrocarbons, on which the survival of the capitalist system depends. And yet, as human beings, we are used to perceiving only the visible surface of our planet, almost as if we lived on an infinite plane.