Nina Hanz

Writer - Critic - Poet​

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I have written a lot about the human body; its movements and illness; the paradoxes of stillness; and the rapid acceleration of time (and people) passing. But for me, these subjects were always incomplete without a context, the spaces within which we find them, and places which ground them. To gain a deeper understanding, I began to look downwards— under.

I began by looking at the land, 

                 what it has gone through and how its slow movements and tectonic shifts seemed, initially, to teach us recovering.

And by looking down, I found all these little things: the gunk that gets stuck under our fingernails, the grit that gets trapped in a clamshell, the tiny particles that make up the enamel of our teeth. Wherever in time or space I found them, they seemed fleeting. My writing was meant as their landing, as their return, as a hardening in time on paper. 

I have always had a close relationship to conservation and ecology, but until I began writing Underdays, my final project at the RCA, I did not know what embodied my art writing, my poetry and my other experiments with language. What I wanted to do was to map our own experiences, memories and pains with that of the Earth’s, what I call geological trauma. 

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