Earthing Project

Earthing Project was born out of curiosity, frustration, and the desire to make intimate, playful work in our outside environments. The four core collaborators work in music, art, and film. We share rural childhoods, urban adult experience and a hunger to tell stories from both perspectives.

We committed to film under the prevailing weather conditions, with limited resources, one day a month for twelve months, throughout a year. By diving into existing mythology and our own personal histories, we made a cycle of films exploring the elastic, myriad connections of humans to the earth and by initiating a surrealist, sensual approach to environmental activism we found an authentic freedom and flexibility towards site and circumstance and an innovative way to engage with climate activism.

Each film was sustainably designed and articulated in Edinburgh and the Lothians and left no trace on the sites. All the footage was taken on our phone cameras. This allowed us to be flexible, instinctive, democratic and to stand in opposition to the frustrating amount of environmental impact and lost time that passes between concept, creation, and completion on a traditional shoot. Subsequently, multidisciplinary artists interacted with our footage from their personal perspectives. Woven together these attitudes created an evolving, echoing conversation between human imagination and the environment.

We recorded some sound elements in the field, several scores predated the films, others were composed live, and all were mastered in the studio to form soundscapes in direct response to the visuals.

Ultimately, we feel that the existing human relationship to the natural world is broken, and that intimate experiences, communication, imagination, and integration are our only way to find balance between human and nature. By playing outside as adults and children, by managing and protecting the places where we play, we can change the course of this climate emergency and make new myths for the next generation.