"Terra Dei Fuochi" 2021

Yasmin Smith

Born 1984, Gadigal Country/Sydney, New South Wales. Lives and works in Gadigal Country/Sydney, New South Wales. Pronouns: she/her.

 

"Terra Dei Fuochi" 2021

Limoges porcelain and poplar wood ash, 40 pieces

 

Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial, Gadigal Country/Sydney.

 

 

In Terra Dei Fuochi, Yasmin Smith engages with the chemical entwinements between toxic anthropogenic garbage and soil remediation. Terra Dei Fuochi (Land of Fire) is an Italian region that derives its name from decades of waste disposal in Campania, run by the mafia. Generated largely by the fashion industry through leather tanning, the copious amounts of waste were illegally burned and buried, leaching toxic contaminates into the once fertile agricultural soil.

 

Smith’s practice often responds to environmental contexts that have experienced intense chemical or human interference. Through the materiality of clay and glaze, she enables matter to bear witness to the biochemical traces of agricultural and industrial histories. To make this work, Smith collaborated with Massimo Fagnano, a Professor of Agronomy from the University of Napoli Federico II, whose research involved planting 20,000 poplar trees on contaminated sites in the Land of Fire to heal the soil through phytoremediation processes.

 

Terra Dei Fuochi is an installation of 40 ceramic cast replicas of poplar trees from the phytoremediation plantation. Arranged in a grid, the mathematical positioning of each trunk correlates with the optimum planting distance that poplars require to stabilise the soil with their roots, and to change its chemical composition in collaboration with microbes. Poplars are hyper-accumulators of heavy metals; they can absorb contaminates such as chromium, cadmium, and zinc through their root systems to repair the soil biome.

 

The ceramic ash-glaze applied to the surface of each cast tree is made from the incinerated branches and leaves of the same poplars, revealing its biochemical traces. Through this action, each ceramic poplar becomes a chemical archive. Terra Dei Fuochi gives voice to an anthropogenic narrative recorded by trees, an organic memory of ecological damage and rehabilitation, which makes apparent the self-healing feedback loops embedded into ecological systems.