“SOMA” 

“Soma, ” part of the installation “Archipelago of Becoming” by the art group SO.8. 2025, ceramics, 17×17×20 cm
 “Soma” is a cast of that liminal state where the body pauses between two of its statements. Its form captures not the result, but the process itself: that moment when defenses lose their rigidity but have not yet become open.

 It was born from observations of how experience changes the bodily landscape. The rough, “armored” side is not armor, but the imprint of tension ingrained into the structure. The smooth, cup-shaped part is not an ideal, but an emerging possibility, a space ready to receive air, a gaze, silence. 

 There is no “before and after” here. There is a bodily geology—a layered memory of the material, where every tension has left a relief, and every opening has become a polished surface, shaped by the breath itself. “Soma” doesn’t ask what the body is. It asks: what does the body remember with its hands? It’s about how experiences aren’t simply stored within us, but transformed into texture: rough or smooth, prickly or receptive. It’s about how healing isn’t erasing scars, but changing their status: from wound to relief, from shell to cup. 

 If bodily memory had a physical cast, this is what it would look like. Not a diagnosis, not a metaphor. But direct evidence: this is how material behaves when simultaneously compressed and released. This is what remains on the surface while the slow work of transforming heaviness into a receptacle takes place within.

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 “Soma” is an actor of internal transition in the installation “Archipelago of Becoming” by the art group SO.8. It embodies that threshold state that precedes any external connection. 

 “Archipelago of Becoming” is comprised of eight ceramic actors. Each of them—from “Soma” to “Alchemist"—materializes its own philosophy of existence: corporeality, order, organicity, narrative, otherness, collectivity, potential, transformation. Their connections are not fixed—they live in constant reassembly. 

The composition changes under the influence of the entire network of actors: the artists, the ceramic forms, light, time, chance. Thus emerges chronicles of collective dynamics, where the capacity to act is distributed among all elements of the system. 

 We create not sculptures, but a living network of relationships, where everything has a voice and influence. This is our philosophical foundation.