Ayoung Kim

Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix

In 2019, Ayoung Kim traveled to Mongolia to research its widespread animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones, and sacred caves that purify human guilt. The Mongolian people’s belief that rocks and minerals are alive, like other natural elements, consider the particular origin myth that human beings were born from stones.

For the video work Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix Kim creates her own hyperbolic mythology connected to the origin of the fictional mineral genderless Petra Genetrix, a figure who also appears in other recent works by the artist. This kind of mineral floats about the space between strata and the national borders, facing migration issues. By way of the notion of Petrogenesis—which refers to a genesis from rocks—Kim wanders the interrelated and overlapped layers of time, as though lost in the Earth’s strata.

As one of the interviewees was saying that “Quartz can be considered to be a type of natural computer, since it absorbs and stores a large amount of energy,” the artist questions that we would think of the rocks and stones that have existed since the beginning of the Earth as the plan- ets’ vehicle for memory storage. This work speaks for the traditional spirituality found in animism and reveals the equivalence between primeval objects and the contemporary and futuristic memory sphere.