Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita traces an artistic research process centred on the underground—the hidden interior of the Earth. The project investigates how science and fiction imagine this environment, examining tropes, narrative strategies, and representational limits in texts that venture below the surface. These studies served as the groundwork for a series of speculative fiction experiments that attempted to minimise human-centred narration and explore nonhuman modes of storytelling. A parallel line of inquiry involved somatic exploration: working with altered sensory conditions inspired by subterranean spaces and developing these experiences into a movement-based, performative practice. The exposition outlines how these strands of research converged in the collaborative creation of the stage performance Terra Incognita, reflecting on the methods, translations, and aesthetic decisions that shaped the final work. Keywords: artistic research, performing body, more-than-human worlds, multispecies entanglements, environmental sensing, becoming, deep time, terraforming, extractivism, mineral, bacteria, inner earth, soil, ecosystem, embodied practice, choreography, performance, storytelling, subterranean fiction, video, stage design