Antenna Roots: The Speaking Ground

Roots are often used as a metaphor for origin, land, stability. In Antenna Roots, we turn that image upside down. We ask: what if roots do not merely connect to and anchor themselves in the soil — what if they function as a kind of “two-way antennas”: psychically sensitive receivers that probe the depths of the earth, but also transmit the signals they receive?

Nature can be understood differently: not merely as a passive background, a landscape or a growing medium, but as an active, living network of communication. Humans sometimes attempt to grasp this — yet always from anthropocentric premises — and therefore often too crudely and impatiently.

Biologists have known this for a long time: tree roots form vast, branching networks that transfer nutrients, chemical signals, even warnings between individuals in danger.

Biology offers its own explanations, but the complexity of root communication invites us to imagine further. Metaphorically, their signals resemble an underground language incomprehensible to humans, filled with unknown words and unfamiliar qualifiers.

In Antenna Roots, we examine this language visually and sonically, even mythically. How does a tree, as it were, listen — how do its roots, trunk, and branches adapt to changes in the soil, how do they respond to sediments of past eras and disturbances yet to come?

For the primary task of trees is not to organize the world, but to respond to it.

All of this is closely connected to how science has sought to understand the forms generated by nature. According to chaos theory, their organization is neither linear nor easily predictable. At its core, both branches and roots follow fractal geometry, repeatedly branching into smaller versions of themselves. Indeed, both branches and roots produce strikingly similar structures — as if they belonged to an above-ground and an underground world, a kind of gravitational inversion, a world turned upside down.

As above, so below, as the old esoteric phrase reminds us.

Yet the tree is also a powerful symbol of chaos, for even a slight change in light alters the direction of growth. A minor collision with the edge of a stone can redirect a root — and perhaps the entire crown. The surrounding wind, air humidity, microorganisms, other plants — each sends its own signal, to which the tree responds.

Ultimately, this is about survival.

And in that sense, about all life.

It is worth remembering that nature does not, in fact, oppose humanity or “rebel” against it. Humans themselves are merely one unstable element among others.

Nevertheless, humanity has treated nature as a totality to be mapped, measured, and organized. Gas, water, ecosystems, animals, and plants have all been subjected to the same logic: the goal is to control, restrain, optimize, and predict.

But what happens when control is imposed on a system based on dynamic instability and constant responsiveness?

When humans violently suppress a signal, nature sends it back in another form: floods, droughts, disrupted nutrient cycles, sudden shifts in ecosystems. From the human perspective, these appear as natural catastrophes and destructive forces; for the system itself, they are merely the fractal network reorganizing itself.

For this reason, roots are not only antennas but also interfaces: places where information flows, but where distortions, delays, and disturbances emerge — where noisy chaos takes on physical form.

The exhibition includes a mythic layer that is not a historically “authentic” mythology, but a modern mythos inspired by ancient epics.

At its center grows the Chaos Tree, an embodiment of a world-tree-like being. Its guardian is Sylva Ananke, “the Necessity of the Forest,” whose red hair consists of roots, and whose crown is built of twigs and interwoven branches. The goddess’s face changes each time a human believes they have seen and recognized it.

The purpose of the myth is not to explain biology, but to offer humans a symbolic map. In it, roots represent memory, history, and deep ecological entanglements. Antennas, in turn, symbolize contact, identification, and the anticipation of the future. The fractal pattern followed by the Chaos Tree’s roots and branches revealsthe complexity of existence — an apparent, mathematical chaos. And Sylva Ananke symbolizes that which refuses to be governed.

The exhibition does not seek to concretize the goddess figure, but allows her to linger in the background of the works — like quietly resonating music.

There is a reason why Antenna Roots brings together so many elements: image, sound art, mathematics, biology, myths, concepts. We believe that only in this way is it possible to approach the language through which nature may be communicating.

The question is geopoetic: How do we attune ourselves? How do we learn to listen to the message the earth has been sending for millions of years? How do we understand that every movement of a root is a response to something we cannot yet see?

But this much is certain: humans are not the antenna of the world — merely one of its signals.

And perhaps a true connection to nature can only arise once we stop shouting our own voice and pause to listen to the quiet, fractal song rising from the depths of the soil.