Project “Terra. Memoria mundi” is a series of gravings about exploring and reproducing one of the thousands of manifestations of the soil. Here, the artist explores it as a metaphor for certain natural cycles that characterise the entire basis of human existence. Working with large-scale geometric shapes and cutouts from cardboard, the artist recreates the textures of the earth and other objects derived from it, such as plants and stones.

Project is dominated by two parallel cycles: one in which the earth acts as the elements necessary for life. Thanks to the soil, people are all feeding and breathing, stepping on it every day throughout their lives, and after death, in the end, everybody comes back to the soil. This is a natural truth encompassing everything simply and organically.

Nevertheless, there is also another cycle. Within it, Aglaya concentrates on the word “terra” as the beginning of the word “territory” invented by humans over their evolution. And here, we can see people fighting tirelessly for pieces of land they want to conquer, soaking the earth with blood spilt — unnaturally from the perspective of the first cycle.

«… I think the earth is magnificent. Its cracks, wrinkles, varieties, and forms feed and allow life, death, war, beginnings and endings of cycles to exist. Its colour, its smell, its dryness or wetness, its components, its minerals, are all like a hard drive on which the memory of the world is stored. And only partially can we study or understand it. In various places, depending on the people who have lived in that area, the earth adopts character traits and becomes like those people. And people or other living beings start resembling that land.
The earth is full of historical facts and blood; oxygen sprouts from it, and the foundations of temples and dwellings stand on it. Oceans rest on it. Civilisations, cultures, and generations of people are buried in it, in cemeteries and in “mass graves”, intentionally or unintentionally formed. Wars have been waged for her throughout the history of humankind, and my people in Ukraine are fighting for it now…”

Made in Düsseldorf, Germany