What Lies Below Is Another Above

Artists: Samuel Baah Kortey, Monai de Paula Antunes, Rubén D'Hers, Diana Ejaita, Jessica Ekomane, Sajan Mani, Tuli Mekondjo, Elia Nurvista, Pınar Öğrenci, Chaveli Sifre, Raul Walch, Sergio Zevallos

Curated by Dr. Elena Agudio and Mistura Allison.

What Lies Below Is Another Above begins from a simple impossibility: what lies beneath us is never simply below. Every ground is already another surface.

Places are composed of shifting temporalities, forgotten infrastructures, buried gestures, and unfinished histories that continue to inhabit the present. Worlds seep into one another, resurfacing unexpectedly through landscapes and materials, bodies, memories, and forms of relation. A surface can conceal another geography; what appears sedimented or exhausted may still be moving underneath.

Bringing together Villa Romana Fellows from 2023 to 2025, the exhibition creates an encounter between artistic practices developed independently, across different geographies, languages, and political concerns. The works retain the autonomy and specificity of their own trajectories. In Recklinghausen, they encounter another territory, another institutional history, and another material imagination, opening unexpected conversations between singular practices and the multiple histories of the place.

The Ruhrgebiet offers particularly charged ground for this encounter. Extraction has shaped its landscapes, architectures, economies, and social histories. What happened underground transformed everything above it: cities, infrastructures, forms of labour, migration, political movements, bodies, and environments. Beneath the surface lie tunnels and abandoned infrastructures, alongside histories of class struggle, displacement, and generations of migrant and racialised labour. Geology and social history sediment within the same ground.

The practices gathered here move through these strata from different directions: through oral histories and archives, ritual and ecology, agriculture and industry, sound and memory, labour and material culture. They follow displaced materials, suppressed histories, migrant bodies, plants, frequencies, spirits, and forms of knowledge that escape dominant regimes of visibility. They inhabit disturbed landscapes, following what survives, mutates, returns, or takes root.

These are practices that grow in the cracks: not because they celebrate rupture, but because disturbance itself becomes the condition through which other relations can emerge. They remain attentive to what a landscape carries, what a body remembers, what an object has absorbed, and what an archive has excluded.

The title What Lies Below Is Another Above turns the perspective once more. Every below can become the surface of another world; every apparently stable ground conceals other orientations. Extraction opened the earth through shafts and tunnels, producing an inverted architecture beneath the Ruhrgebiet. The Kunsthalle Recklinghausen itself emerged after the Second World War from the transformation of a former air-raid bunker. History remains material here: something that can be excavated, unsettled, and reimagined.

The exhibition follows subterranean connections, forgotten passages, and displaced materials, allowing histories and geographies to touch without collapsing into one another. What emerges is a landscape made of many landscapes: Florence and Recklinghausen, plantations and mines, domestic spaces and industrial terrains, archives and bodies, earth and atmosphere.

Digging downwards, or reaching upwards, may eventually lead us somewhere else entirely.

What lies below is another above.

The project is part of Mutual Presence, a collaborative project between Villa Romana in Florence, Italy, and Kunsthalle Recklinghausen in Germany - institutions connected to two of Germany’s longest-standing art prizes.

Mutual Presence began with Tales of Traces, Stones and Moonlight, an exhibition presenting the three most recent recipients of the “junger westen” art prize in Florence from June 6 to July 31, 2026. Curated by Nico Anklam, with Kerstin Weber-Baumann, research curator and Theresa Widua, curatorial assistant from Recklinghausen.

The second chapter of Mutual Presence will open on September 12, 2026 at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen. Curated by Elena Agudio and Mistura Allison, the group show What Lies Below Is Another Above will bring together the Villa Romana Fellows 2023, 2024, and 2025, presenting their work in Recklinghausen.