Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Eating Soil is an audio-visual-tactile installation and a series of performances and activations presented throughout the period of the Biennale. The work examines how hierarchies of knowledge systems may be challenged and how we may attune our senses to alternate ways in which knowledge—whether from the point of view of the human or non-human—may be accepted.

The title of the work alludes to the multiple historical identities of Pulau Sekijang Bendera (currently known as St John’s Island). The work draws inspiration from islands that have lost their names, shapeshifting creation myths, lines plotted by animal navigation, trickster tides, submerged reefs and maritime arteries. The work unfolds over nine archetypal signatures and departure points, namely: The Guide, The Witness, The Wrathful Deity, The Pyramidal Cell, The Gate, The Peculiar Habitat, The Rotating Naga, The Talisman, and The Pragmatic Prayer. These nine points are presented as a diorama of (inter)cardinal directions, palimpsests and constellations that can be read or experienced through a variety of ways and engages with the entanglements of various knowledge systems.

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Talismans for Peculiar Habitats offers a looking glass to the ineluctably peculiar ways we form kinship, are bound to or avert the burdens of bloodlines and the making and breaking of (found) family who construct sustaining communities of comfort and care. The work is marked by the seascapes and spiritscapes that form cumulative coordinates to the artist’s relation to the ambiguous shorelines we call home, and other places we safeguard and return to.
The work traces life narratives marked by health crises, mourning, dematerialising home, domesticating doubt and crossing physical-psychical thresholds to seek refuge through imagining communities with strangers. Composed from personal mementos, handwritten notes, small sculptural works, effigies, shrouds, talismanic textiles, trays of offerings and other ritually performed gestures, the installation draws from the voices and fragments from local/regional historiographies of living, dying, surviving and our own personal imaginings of it.
What stories do we tell of final rites, of peculiar phantoms, of ruined / renewed landscapes of isolation / belonging, of time and the chaos of crossing thresholds we might be unfamiliar with? What are the ways to gently observe anyone who has transitioned to other worlds on their own (terms) or the spectres estranged from their bloodline of ancestors?[1]

_{[1] Zarina Muhammad, “Talismans for Peculiar Habitats — Girlsandghostsintrees,” girlsandghostsintrees.com, accessed November 9, 2023, https://girlsandghostsintrees.com/Talismans-for-Peculiar-Habitats.}

Whispering Secrets into Trees, The Poetics of Moving Earth, Terra as Palimpsest are 3 vignettes that offer starting points and a first iteration of <earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, a broader body of work and collaborative research project looking into environmental histories, infrastructures overlaid on spirit paths, extractive capitalist urbanization, archival fragments, moving, shapeshifting walking paths through human built landscapes alongside what lies below and above these trails and coordinates.
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest > are invitations and invocations to see with skin, hear with our feet, feel our way through spatial interruptions and somatically attend to sound at points of transit, change and threshold-crossing.

Each cumulative form of this long-term project is an invitation to reframe hegemonic cartographies, to conjure the ecologies of selves within the seen and unseen, and make memory maps from meandering through the homely and strange, the uninhabitable, the chthonic, the otherworlds and more than human worlds that we share habits and habitats with[2].

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_{[2] Zarina Muhammad, “Earth, Land, Sky and Sea as Palimpsest — Girlsandghostsintrees,” girlsandghostsintrees.com, accessed November 9, 2023, https://girlsandghostsintrees.com/earth-land-sky-and-sea-as-palimpsest-1.}