Matter Matters: The Aesthetics and Politics of Soil
Soil constitutes the world we live from and in. It is the foundation of all life, provides food and fuel, shapes landscapes and cities. It is an “inscribed body” and “scarred terrain” (Savvy Contemporary 2019), visualizes time and teaches us about the Earth’s past. According to some anthropogenic myths, mankind was formed from soil; ‘humus’ shares its linguistic roots with ‘human’, and eventually all life becomes soil. Yet its status is precarious: According to the Global Land Outlook report, up to 40% of all soils are degraded: washed away, sealed, poisoned, salinated, contaminated, parched, depleted, over-fertilized (Sheikh and Gray 2018). Neo-extractivism poses a further threat to the integrity of soil, engendering our epoch’s redefinition as ‘Plantationocene’ (Haraway 2015): Soil becomes a crime scene, an object of colonial exploitation and environmental violence (Demos 2020).
Today, artists reflect upon the precarious status of soil and its aesthetic and political implications. They tackle political and environmental, mythological-narrative and personal issues, acknowledging both soil’s sculptural and symbolic potentials. They build and sculpt, map and display, metabolize and listen to soil, collect and create fertile soils, narrate their stories and explore their sensual qualities.
We invited paper proposals from different disciplines that discuss the materiality, aesthetics, politics and agency of soil in art and the discourses, cultures and metaphors surrounding it. We welcomed contributions that think with and through soil to assess the histories and semiotics of sedimentation, composting, stratigraphy and neo-extractivism, reflecting upon issues of agropolitics, land rights, land degradation, and the geological imaginary.
Session Convenors:
Kassandra Nakas, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich/Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Jessica Ullrich, University of Fine Arts Münster, Germany
Speakers:
Maja Fowkes, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, London
Reuben Fowkes, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, London
For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted: Ecocentric Practices for Land Restoration
In his Second Treatise of 1690, John Locke spelled out the rationale for the appropriation of common land, stating that “as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.” For the Enlightenment political theorist, it was exploitation of the soil that justified the individual right to own land, expropriating the commons and subjugating colonial wastelands. Such codifications of the extractivist approach to the soil laid the ground for the agrarian transformations of carbon modernity, which treated it as a passive recipient of chemical inputs for monocultural crops. As climate breakdown tests the ecological limits of heavy agriculture, how have artists exposed the entwined colonial and environmental histories of land and proposed ecocentric practices based on more-than-human comradeship and care? These questions are addressed through Anetta Mona Chişa’s One Are (2021), which translated the Roman unit of territory into a 100m2 inverted cast of a ploughed field to reveal the materiality of the soil in its earthy imprint of tilling, cracking and erosion. Also considered is Cooking Sections’ For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted (2019), which engaged with the histories of chernozem from the Ukrainian steppe, from the terror of Soviet grain requisitioning to the impact of shifting climatic zones. The artist duo also collaborated with lawyers to legally enshrine the defence of the soil against capitalist extractivism, encapsulating the planetary tipping point in attitudes towards what anthropologist Kristina Lyons calls the “complex self-organising system” underground.
Elisabetta Rattalino, Faculty of Design and Art, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy
Copper, Nitrogen and Other Elements that Soil Should not Remember
South Tyrol – Alto Adige is an Alpine region between Italy and Austria, nowadays best known for its dolomitic and agricultural landscapes. Over the past decade, several artworks have addressed this land, its imageries along with the complex political, economic and cultural entanglements that still shape them. This paper presents two recent artworks that, in different ways, engage with the critical legacy related to agriculture in this area: Elena Mazzi’s Copperialities (2022) and Kathrin Hornek’s Plant Plant (2021). Developed within an academic research project focused on practices of scientific visualisation, Mazzi’s Copperialities (2022) is a video installation that emerges at the intersection of the artist’s ecological practice with scientific research into the impact of copper on soils in vineyards and apple orchards. Katrin Hornek’ s Plant Plant (2022) retraces the history and chemical legacy of the Montecatini fertilizer factory in Sinich-Sinigo, near Bolzano-Bozen, from its foundation during the Fascist regime to the present. Developed in dialogue with BAU, a South-Tirolean institute for contemporary arts and ecology, and Ar/Ge Kunst, Hornek’s investigation materializes into a film, sculptures and a public performative walk. This paper discusses how Mazzi’s and Hornek’s projects testify, respectively, to contemporary practices of territorial consumption and colonial toxic legacies in the soil of South Tyrol. Furthermore, it considers how these and other recent artworks engaging with the notion of soil memory expand and reconfigure anthropocentric notions of dissonant memory and heritage.
Salvarpatti Manuvelraj Ponnudurai, independent researcher, Delhi, India
Understanding the Politics of Soil in Tamil Speaking South India: Aesthetics and Tamil Culture, Soil Smuggling and Land Degradation
Tamil Speaking South India (TSSI) or ‘Tamil Nadu’ constitutes the south-eastern portion of peninsular India, renowned for its Tamil culture. There is a strong belief in Tamil culture that God is present in everything particularly with the five elements of nature (pancha tattvas) viz. Water, Air, Fire, Earth and Space hence they are being worshipped. In TSSI ‘Earth’ is worshipped in the form of soil mainly for agricultural benefits. TSSI is famous for its festivals particularly Vinayaka Chaturthi and Navarathri Kolu which are related with dolls and images made up of soil/clay. The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board in August, 2022 has instructed idol makers to sell Vinayaka idols made of eco-friendly material such as traditional virtuous clay and mud (free from plaster of Paris, plastic and thermocol) but in contrast, TSSI is infamous for its soil mining/smuggling. Although, soil smuggling contributes to extracting minerals, construction of buildings, infrastructure development however, the unscrupulous sand mining activities leads to environmental degradation. Lately, TSSI encountering soil degradation specifically soil salinization, contamination and etc.
By employing the visual images of festival dolls, soil degradation and other available government records/media reports, this paper aims to explore to what extent do this soil smuggling and land degradation affect, create, benefit, or transform the Tamil people in general and Tamil culture in particular. To strengthen the argument mainly for the theoretical analysis of ‘politics of soil’ this research will look into the efforts initiated by Dravidian political parties of TSSI to control the illegal sand mining. This study is also in some respects an investigation of Tamil culture vis-à-vis ‘soil aesthetics’ and ‘politics of soil’ which is based on an art historical approach.
Greg Minissale, University of Auckland, New Zealand
The Soil: From Abstract Mind Wandering to Politico-Aesthetic Mindfulness
With examples of artworks by Dubuffet and Masson, the soil seems ancient and prehistorical; its sediments and particles existed at the time of our ancestors and ran through their fingers and toes, existing even before life itself. With the soil and earth on our skin, under our fingernails, and in our art, we are in direct contact with the archefossil, with the unthinkable origins of consciousness. This quality of imagining is special and can produce sensuous dream images and creative mind wandering.
This use of soil in art appears quite different from what contemporary artist Herman de Vries shows us with his ‘earth museum,’ 6,500 samples of earth collected from around the world. Sometimes these samples are finely sieved and smudged onto paper in blocks that resemble watercolour palettes. Sometimes they are arranged on the gallery floor in a museological parody. Some samples are from Chernobyl and Buchenwald. Others are from ancient Indigenous sites in Australia. The soil, this thing that is nonhuman and yet so intricately entwined with human destiny, becomes a scientific specimen undergoing classification, but the system is undermined by affective associations of place that cannot be shaken off in our encounter with these samples. This is also the case in artworks by Aotearoa New Zealand Māori artists Star Gossage, Moewai Marsh, and Hohua Thompson, where the soil is explored haptically and sensuously but in order to remind viewers of colonial appropriation of the soil and contestations of the land . This paper traces the journey from abstract and formal mind wandering to politico-aesthetic mindfulness, and suggests that these forms of engagement with the soil can be mutually reinforcing and complementary.
Kirsten Wagner, University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld, Germany
Hollow Out, Hollow In. Earth as an Object of Material Imagination in Gaston Bachelard’s Work
Starting from a series of works on the history of science and on epistemology, Gaston Bachelard turned to the poetic-creative power of imagination in Psychanalyse du feu, 1938. The Psychoanalysis of fire represented the first of a total of five writings on the four elements within which Bachelard–influenced by 19th century philosophy as well as psychoanalysis, empathy aesthetics and phenomenology–developed his theory of the ’material imaginationʻ. Bachelard dedicated even two studies to the element of earth, La terre et les rêveries de la volonté, 1948, and La terre et les rêveries du repos, 1948. They refer not only to the double affordance of the earth with its inorganic and organic substances, namely on the one hand to be able to be worked in a formative way and on the other hand to provide a protective dwelling, but also to an active and reposing being. Bachelard’s work on the material imagination of the four elements seems re-levant today in aesthetic and ecological terms, even if it remains open to criticism because of the naturalisation of cultural processes of signification. The article is divided into three parts: The first serves as an introduction to Bachelard’s theory of the imaginativeness or material imagination. Since Bachelard essentially related it to poetry, i.e. language, sculptures and graphics are only mentioned in passing in his writings on the four elements, his concept of the ’poetic imageʻ is at the same time extended here to other medial image forms. The second part focuses on the element earth and the images it evokes due to its materiality. A third part relates current artistic works to Bachelard’s early theorisation of the imaginative and aesthetic potential of terrestrial materials.
Alexandra R. Toland, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany
Artistic Soil Sensing
Proximal soil sensing (PSS) refers to electrochemical, spectroscopic, geophysical and mechanical sensing methods used to gather data at multiple scales for soil scientific study and land management policy. Alongside advancements in PSS, artists contribute new insights to soil sensing by facilitating multisensory experiences, developing new vocabularies for what is sensed, raising awareness about soil ecosystems and their complexities, and producing innovative research on soil phenomenology. Case studies in soil chromatography by artists such as Claire Pentecost and Debra Solomon, sound and smellscapes by artists such as Markus Maeder and Anaïs Tondeur, soil tasting experiments by artists such as Laura Parker and masharu, and multisensory environments by artists such as Asad Raza and Otobong Nkanga complement the techno-scientific field of proximal soil sensing with the aim of ideating connections between human bodies and soils bodies. On the one hand, they include examples of technologically-conditioned modes of perception through the use of instruments, (see e.g. Jennifer Gabrys, 2016, for critical discussion on environmental sensing technologies); on the other hand they invite direct modes of sensing with the human body as baseline. The idea is that while soil sensing has become essential for monitoring soil organic carbon, erosion rates, and water and nutrient availability, good data does not necessarily lead to good land use. Methods of artistic soil sensing can extend the technologically driven “new paradigm for agriculture” (Rossel and Bouma, 2016) by creating sensory experiences that evoke attentiveness (cf. Krzywoszynska, 2021; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015) and underline the physiological, emotional, and sociopolitical connections to soil as a fundamental basis for land care.