Here’s an unusual perspective . . .
An artist writing about soil. I came across this piece in Frieze, link here to the entire article.
Soil contains worlds and forms the medium out of which our world grows. An opaque, concatenated substance, it’s both dead and alive. (Without microbial life, it’s not soil, but dirt.) Often hidden from sight, its internal structure is visible in core samples and furrows: clods or peds are arranged in a network that is both stable and lightweight.
Soil is almost completely absent from our current cultural imaginary and rarely considered in its complexity. Instead, it’s a metonym for Mother Earth, something to smear on yourself in a hippie ritual. We imagine ourselves as techno-autonomous beings residing in a real world that is merely a projection of an electronic matrix. As an artistic medium, soil is often used decoratively or treated as a readymade – a found material that represents the ‘natural world’. But soil doesn’t make a distinction between natural and unnatural matter. The detritus of contemporary human life – our phones, clothes, Styrofoam – are not the opposite of soil but its future components, just like the soil in the ancient Agora of Athens features fragments of urns, or the soil of Teufelsberg near Berlin is comprised of charred wreckage from World War II. Right now, cities are unwittingly making new soil types, known as technosoils, in which these anthropogenic components are present.
Soil health, which is in crisis, is a measure of the loss of a set of ways to manage plants and animals that build up soil and prevent it from eroding or withering into dirt. Just as animals once as omnipresent as oysters or krill can disappear if global water quality degenerates, so the disappearance of soil will doom most terrestrial life, turning our global political struggles about who owns what land into a dark, irrelevant joke.
Asad Raza is an artist. Absorption (2019) will be on view at the Ruhrtriennale, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Bochum, Germany, from 14 August to 25 September.
Image in thumbnail: Asad Raza, Absorption, 2019/20. Courtesy: the artist and Gropius Bau, Berlin; photograph: Ray Stonada