(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.

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