Spirit Gleaning

Spirit Gleaning is a walking-based, site-responsive project by Minoosh Zomorodinia that explores land, memory, displacement, and care. Rooted in the artist’s experience as an Iranian immigrant, the work uses walking, mapping, and ritual actions to investigate how landscapes hold personal and collective histories.

A 2016 alum of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Zomorodinia returns to its 538-acre landscape to consider the environmental conditions, particularly climate change and wildfire, that shape how land is experienced, remembered, and cared for. Their practice engages earth, water, air, and fire as frameworks for understanding the world. At Djerassi, strong winds and shifting weather become generative forces: air evokes breath, resistance, and movement, while fire references climate danger and inherited fears of punishment and loss.

Created through the Djerassi x Root Division Residency for Further Triennial, the project emerges from walking, observing, recording, and listening to the site. Zomorodinia traces routes using soil, plants, and evidence of local fauna, drawing attention to visible and invisible histories embedded in the land. Video, projection, staged photography, and 3D scanning translate these embodied encounters into digital form.

At Root Division, an interactive installation extends the project into a space for reflection and sanctuary, connecting land, memory, belief, resistance, and shared experience.