The Gift of the Mild Soil

2025
Video Installation

The Gift Of The Mild Soil (Film)

The short movie explores the rhythm of shared daily acts and collective existence. As we weave our distinct narratives while embodying crowness, our lives intertwine in moments of quiet reflection, shared meals, coffee and tea making, travels and creative practices.

from the exhibition Scores of Resilience, Willem Twee, NL, 2025

These kind gestures root us in trust and belonging. We observe each other and ourselves through the lens of “the crow” and the camera, getting to know one another as one, and as together, and nurturing a deeper intimacy between ourselves and our daily landscape we inhabit.
In these times of uncertainty, we offer one another faith. Through gathering, tending, and creating, our everyday rituals become a quiet yet unwavering message of resistance, a reminder that even in darkness, we persist.

In Crow Stitch's first project, The Gift of the Mild Soil, we follow the threads that grow from our individual selves and connect us. By embodying crowness, creatures of nature, yet ever-adapting to our urban landscape, we are observing, learning and enduring, testing the invisible boundaries of our daily urban life and discovering the hidden pockets of wilderness in between. As naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes in Crow Planet, their presence is both a warning of habitat destruction, where only the most resilient survive, and a promise of hope. Hope that we might reconnect to the sense of natural interdependence and that we might grow a more profound, creative and wilder attention to the land we inhabit.

In this metaphorical and mutual space, we invite the viewer to reflect on their patterns of resilience and nurture reciprocal acts of faith.

from the exhibition Scores of Resilience, Willem Twee, NL, 2025

Photo Credit to Crow Stitch Collective & Ben Nienhuis