(re)connecting.earth Instruction, 2026 – Jeewi Lee x Phillip C. Reiner

> It begins as a mass, uncountable, rushing through the fingers, too many to see. The more there is, the faster it moves. Then the stream thins. The pace slows on its own. What remains is a thin layer pressed to the skin, no longer falling freely. Now each one needs attention. A pause. A small movement to release it. What was effortless now takes patience. Until the last one sits alone in the palm.

The instruction poster is part of the (re)connecting.earth Biennale's ongoing series of artist instructions, presented in public spaces as reproducible prints in various DIN formats. The reconnecting.earth project commissions international artists to create instructional works that invite sensory interaction with natural environments. Philosopher Baptiste Morizot frames this approach as a response to a "crisis of sensitivity" — a diminished capacity for perceptual engagement with the non-human world. Previous instructions have been shown at the Sea Art Festival Busan, in Kiel, Geneva, Berlin, and Dessau. This instruction draws on Field of Fragments research: the process of isolating individual sand grains from mass, translated into a bodily experience. The text describes holding sand and releasing it grain by grain, shifting attention from quantity to singularity. The progression from effortless flow to deliberate release mirrors the research process itself: mass becomes individual under sustained attention. Where the sculptures make individual grains visible through scale, the instruction makes them perceptible through touch and patience.