What Lies Below Is Another Above

13 September – 22 November 2026

Opening: 12 September 2026, 5PM

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Kunsthalle Recklinghausen

Große-Perdekamp-Straße 25–27

45657 Recklinghausen

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The Villa Romana Fellows in Recklinghausen

‍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

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Curated by Elena Agudio and Mistura Allison

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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. They resurface unexpectedly through landscapes and materials, through 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, What Lies Below Is Another Above creates an encounter between artistic practices that developed independently, across different geographies, languages, and political concerns. The exhibition is not organised around a single theme, nor were these works conceived in response to a common curatorial framework. Instead, their coming together in Recklinghausen generates another constellation. The works retain the autonomy and specificity of their own trajectories, while meanings emerge through proximity: between works, between practices, and between these artistic positions and a territory whose ground carries its own dense histories.

This principle has long been fundamental to Villa Romana. Artists working from radically different positions temporarily inhabit the same house, sharing time and space while pursuing singular practices. Proximity produces affinities, frictions, conversations, and sometimes unexpected forms of interdependence. Difference remains present. The exhibition carries this ecology from Florence to Recklinghausen and exposes it to another territory, another institutional history, and another material imagination.

The Ruhrgebiet offers particularly charged ground for such an 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. As Kathryn Yusoff has argued, geology itself cannot be disentangled from colonialism, racial capitalism, and the unequal distribution of labour, bodies, and resources. Beneath the surface of this region lie tunnels and abandoned infrastructures, but also histories of class struggle, displacement, and generations of migrant and racialised labour whose contribution has often remained peripheral to dominant narratives. Geology and social history become strata of the same ground.

The practices gathered here approach these strata from different directions. They move through oral histories and archives, ritual and ecology, agriculture and industry, sound and memory, labour and material culture. Some attend to the afterlives of colonial infrastructures; others follow displaced materials, suppressed histories, migrant bodies, plants, frequencies, spirits, or forms of knowledge that persist outside dominant regimes of visibility. Together, they suggest that histories continue to act long after their supposed endings.

Anna Tsing’s notion of disturbed landscapes offers one possible way of entering this constellation: environments profoundly transformed by extraction, displacement, and ecological damage, where life nevertheless continues to invent forms of coexistence. 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. The Fellows work within such unstable terrains, following what survives, mutates, returns, or takes root.

Their practices trace passages between extraction and care, visibility and opacity, violence and repair, human histories and more-than-human worlds. They remain attentive to what a landscape carries, what a body remembers, what an object has absorbed, and what an archive has excluded. Ground, from this perspective, is never neutral. It is dense with what has happened there and with possibilities that have yet to acquire form.

The title What Lies Below Is Another Above turns this proposition over once more. Underground and surface cease to describe a simple vertical hierarchy. Every below can become the surface of another world; every apparently stable ground conceals other orientations. Looking downward therefore also becomes a way of looking elsewhere. Extraction opened the earth through shafts and tunnels, producing an inverted architecture beneath the Ruhrgebiet. The exhibition takes this spatial condition as an invitation to think beyond established positions of above and below, centre and margin, visibility and disappearance.

The encounter takes place within a site that has itself been continually reimagined. The Kunsthalle Recklinghausen emerged after the Second World War from a former air-raid bunker: an architecture designed for protection during war became a space dedicated to artistic encounter. Since then, and through the history of the junger westen Prize, generations of artists have entered this building with the urgencies of their respective presents. Its walls hold this accumulation without resolving it.

The meeting between Villa Romana and Kunsthalle Recklinghausen therefore brings together two institutions shaped, in very different ways, by the question of how inherited structures can be inhabited otherwise. Villa Romana, founded in 1905 as an artists’ house and place of artistic autonomy, has been continuously transformed by the generations of artists who have lived and worked there. The Kunsthalle carries within its architecture the material memory of destruction and reconstruction. In both places, history persists as something to work with: a ground that can be excavated, unsettled, and reimagined.‍

What Lies Below Is Another Above inhabits this ground without seeking to stabilise it. The exhibition gathers works that follow 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

- Elena Agudio

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‍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 12 September 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.

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