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Long abstract:

Soil remediation is understood, in soil sciences and agronomy, as removing pollution or contaminants from the soil, in processes of recuperation and repair (Aachen and Eichmann 2009, p. vii). These processes are instigated by humans when soil is assessed to be severely damaged, often through the presence of metals, radioactivity or synthetic chemicals such as PFAS. While some such pollution has striking visual properties, such as the bright orange of an iron-steeped post-mining landscape, environmental pollution is not always visible, and in many areas, incentives to remediate soil are lacking. This paper will discuss a range of artworks, primarily in the Nordic context, which have in various ways highlighted soil pollution. From works that call attention to the (often uncertain) effect of particular pollutants to hands-on soil bioremediation resulting in artistic outcomes, the paper argues that these artworks in various ways re-mediate (bring into new mediated contexts, cf. Bolter & Grusin 2000) material understandings of what soil pollution can entail, assessments of what soil is polluted enough to warrant remediation, and how it might be remedied. The paper argues that artistic re-mediations thus bring into the foreground the presence of pollutants in specific soil localities, considering what arts of noticing this entails, but also discusses elements of the soil situation which might be consequently relegated to the background when artworks focus in on pollution and repair.

Aachen, L., & Eichmann, P. (2009). Soil Remediation. Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Bolter, J.D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press.

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Who, or what, mediates pollution? In Bitterfeld-Wolfen, industrial heritage is a fundamental part of the cultural fabric of the city. However, processes of bioremediation have masked ongoing environmental violence through the lush spectacle of reconstructed (urban-industrial) nature, so as to erase the former fly ash and putrid odor from collective consciousness. “Sky inside the Soil” is a multi-phase, co-authored artistic research project that explores the roles of plants and trees as mediators between soil and sky in more-than-human communities of extreme toxicity. Following the seasonal cycle of ruderal plants growing around the notoriously polluted Silbersee (Silver Lake), we imagine through them the historical trajectories of labor, leakage, and repair on a former mining pit once used for wastewater from the Agfa film factory and chemical textiles plant in Bitterfeld-Wolfen. We use archival photographs and pigments derived from plant biomass to reflect on the social, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of pollution through the medium of silkscreen – a tightly woven nylon mesh, not unlike the synthetic nylon products once manufactured in Wolfen. We consider changes in viscosity over time and invite an embodied understanding of such changes though the repetitive process of silkscreen printing: prepare, place, pour, pull, lift, sweep, repeat. Using these motions to structure our reflections, we work-with and think-with vegetal mediators to re(con)textualize ideas about the long-term, more-than-human labor of remediation and regeneration.

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In this paper, we ethnographically explore the complex relationship between soil contamination and urban ecological flourishing in Tel Aviv, challenging views of urban development and environmental degradation via the lens of three Military-Industrial Brownfields . By introducing the concept of 'celebrated toxicity', we underscore the potential positive impacts of soil contamination in creating spaces where urban nature can thrive amidst our 'capitalist society's ruins'. This perspective aligns with the panel's focus on reimagining soil not merely as a natural resource but as an anthropogenic entity, embodying a dynamic interplay between natural and cultural elements nurtured through human care.

Our analysis situates the paradox of soil contamination within a broader discourse on soil repair and ecological care, illustrating how areas hindered by contamination can inadvertently serve as sanctuaries for biodiversity. This investigation contributes to the panel's exploration of soil recuperation after pollution, presenting contaminated urban sites as living ecologies that benefit from and respond to thoughtful human intervention and bioremediation efforts.

By engaging with soil ecologies, remediation practices, and the aesthetics of contaminated landscapes, our study extends an invitation to speculate on and artistically reimagine soil health, commons, and futures. We argue for the recognition of contaminated soils as spaces of potential, where ecological and social transformation can be ignited through the reevaluation of our interactions with and care for soil.

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This paper examines transformation of soil knowledges and remediation practices during periods of political transition. Approaching soils as dynamic natural-cultural compositions, this contribution discusses the changing role and position of soil science and soil practitioners in relation to Kazakhstan’s dryland ecosystems during Soviet and independent history. The Soviet modernization campaign of the 1950s and 60s with expansion of agricultural and mining projects left legacies of polluted and depleted soils while transforming soil science into an agricultural discipline. At the same time, Soviet soil scientists were able to bring more holistic concepts of the biosphere and biogeochemistry to international attention through participating in international projects organized by the UN. These traditions became a vital resource for Kazakhstan’s environmental movements during the liberalization period since the mid-1980s. Soil ecologists studied ways to restore what they called technogenic environments and wastelands after mining. In various projects, they were able to continue remediation and recultivation experiments of damaged landscapes, re-introducing local pioneer plants and accelerate the slow process of ecosystems recovery. Soil experts and practitioners had to adapt to the post-independence economic and political transformations that involved working with new local and international institutions as well as technoscientific and traditional approaches to soil health and remediation. As Kazakhstan continues to rely on extractive industries established during the Soviet period the revaluation of its history remains a highly contested issue. This paper describes these processes of transformation and examines how they affected soil practices and ways of dealing with depleted soils.

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Agricultural government science in Thailand's northern highlands has focused on raising the productivity of highland "hill tribe" ethnic minority agriculture. This paper draws on a gathering and workshop planned through a process of participatory action research beginning in February 2022 and taking place from 7-8 October 2023. It follows the work of an ethnic minority governmental agricultural extension worker as he navigates an elevated, and thus mistrusted, position. The paper offers a methodological and a theoretical contribution. First, it reflects on and analyses the process of working with soil health as a core part of the gathering, analysing how soil health became a boundary object around which the village's strategic orientation towards external (governmental and commercial) relations over time, played out. Second, it analyses the workshop as a methodology that instigates processual remaking in the village, in relation to its socioecological base, belief systems, household knowledge, and commodity production. The workshop holds several contradictions together: why is technical soil knowledge, embedded as it is in Thailand's monarchic history, of so little interest in the highlands--akin to the scant interest farmers once had towards coffee? Bringing together social reproduction theory, STS, and materialist ecofeminism, I suggest that agricultural and environmental knowledge around long-life perennial trees are constituted in household reproduction as a set of gendered, genealogical practices. With kin and household reproduction as core bases, the utility of transferable technical knowledge for commodity crop production holds less currency than in the lowlands, where it travels through moral-religious expectations of royal patronage.

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This paper is structured around an inquiry into fallowing – the practice of leaving agricultural land uncultivated for a regularly recurring period of time, which used to be an integral part of European agriculture and is still in use in different places and different forms, even as the advent of synthetic fertilisers and chemical weed control have reshaped the agricultural context in which it emerged. Fallowing still persists as a practice, and as an object interest in agricultural policy and microbiology, responding to a growing concern with the depletion and regeneration of soils in agricultural and environmental policy; in this persistence it shapes and reshapes forms of knowledge about and relation to depleted soils.

More specifically, this paper will explore the practice off fallowing as a buffer – ecological, chemical, financial – and a mediator in highly disturbed ecosystems. Fallowing endows cultivation systems with different kinds of flexibility, allows for more or less violent modes of negotiation with a host of plants and micro-organisms at the margins of agriculture, and sometimes enables the regulation of grain prices by modulating production as well as the controlled fostering of wild plant and bird life. This paper will investigate the contradictory facets of this untimely diplomatic tool, whose archaic nature is remobilised in these transitional times.

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The emblematic oak trees of the dehesa woodland pastures in southwestern Spain are increasingly falling victim to the ‘seca’. Destroying contiguous patches of dehesa, the disease threatens the livelihoods of farmers and endangers an invaluable anthropogenic ecosystem that is often considered the ‘last barrier against desertification’. Farmers and scientists take a keen interest in understanding causes and finding possible solutions to prevent the seca’s further spread. While its name points to the visible drying out of the trees, it takes its course at the roots of mostly holm and cork oaks. Scientists trace phytophthora cinnamomi as the fatal pathogen: The fungus-like water mould spreads rapidly through the soil and infects the oaks’ roots, causing their rotting and the eventual death of the trees. Biologists and environmental scientists point out that the compacted soils of the dehesa pastures resulting from their overgrazing provide excellent conditions for the cultivation of phytophthora.

Meanwhile, a notable number of farmers on the Iberian Pensinsula have found their own way to combat the seca and secure the future of their dehesa farms: By redirecting their gaze from the animal to the soil, they seek to restore healthy and productive pastures. Holistic management promises to combine the sustainable virtues of the past with the demands of modern working and living standards. Consequently, fences become ‘electric herders’, and what used to be a vast savannah-like landscape has been parcelled into miniature plots. Based on ethnographic research, my contribution rekindles questions of vision, temporality, and compensation in human-soil-relations.

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In this presentation I offer ethnographic materials from ongoing fieldwork in the compost station and laboratory of a soil-food-web collective start-up in Italy, where soil practitioners, scientists and farmers experiment collaboratively. Responding to the pressing need to make space for the rhizosphere’s thick relationalities in new ways to engage and take care of the living soil in agriculture, my informants elaborate alternative knowledges, practices, imaginaries, and collectives of soil-food-web care and experimentation. Backed by larger translocal networks of agroecological alternatives, I argue that these engagements can prefigure emergent forms of what I call grass/roots technoscience in an effort to ‘compost’ the Green Revolution and its legacies.

Such attempts, I show, depend on extensive mediations: from those between different knowledges, approaches, and concerns that are made explicit in my informants’ collaborations, to those facilitated by the technological infrastructure of the laboratory (like microscopes, cameras, and so on), to the multispecies mediations of living compost. Shifting away from an understanding of soils based principally on chemistry, such microbiologically attuned approaches to repairing the living soil bring to the fore soils as a contact zone constantly being (re)mediated. As these relationalities are constantly troubled by the politics of (non-)scalability, though, I also highlight the frictions, troubles and surprises that emerge in my informants’ attempts to facilitate the reproduction and diffusion of microbial communities in the soil-food-web - in the hope of learning how to repair and compost Green Revolution agriculture.

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Extractivist projects proceed globally and often impact indigenous peoples’ cultures and natures. The Sorbs and their land are one such group, claiming autochthonous status in Germany and insisting on Lusatia as their homeland. Lusatia, too, is known for lignite, brown coal, mining. With this paper I explore the plausibility that the discursive relation between Sorbs, coal, land and other natures is shaped by an extractivist ordering. For this, I analyse a music clip and a museum that share references to having received support by two powerful regional players, the Sorbian representative body Domowina and the mining operators Vattenfall/LEAG. This analysis argues for identifying a form of earthlessness in the Sorbian problematisation of coal. I then reflect upon what gets de/stabilised in these orderings of coal and earthly entities beyond coal. This raises questions about how autochthony claims relate not only to power but also earthly matters.

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Organic manure is part of a soil repair assemblage. It is a coproduction of plants, animals, humans, worms, insects, microbes, and others and is applied to enrich the soil for plant life. Such assemblage involves the maintenance and design of soil structure such as terraces, the regulation of rain with drainage systems, irrigation technology, active protection against erosion and much more. It demands multispecies cooperation with active human involvement and reacts sensitive to environmental challenges. In the Moroccan Souss, however, it has become an integral part of cash crop supply chain infrastructures. This region has been designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve on account of its worldwide unique argan forest ecosystem. At the same time, it is also a ‘Garden of Europe’, i.e. the site of high-standard agrobusiness. Manure constitutes one of the links connecting these worlds. It integrates small-scale conventional agro-forestry into highly technicized cash crop agribusiness thereby transforming it. Beyond its importance for a sophisticated conventional system of agroforestry, it proves also indispensable for the fertilization of irrigated land in high-end modern cash crop production where chemical fertilizers cannot replace it successfully. However, this demand for manure has significantly contributed to the demise of small-scale agriculture and the exploitation of a protected forest ecosystem for a capitalist agroindustrial infrastructure.

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Terroir, or the ‘taste of place’, is the unique assemblage of factors that define a geography and the food products of that region. Since the 18th century, the elusive terroir has received legal expression through protected place-brands like Champagne wine or Darjeeling tea (see Josling 2006). In short, terroir products presume a sensible and measurable link between a food and its place of origin– between the taste of a product and its endemic soil.

This paper explores the place-taste link in terroir as one of continuous production and ‘more-than-human’ collaboration. It focuses on the types of evidence that are leveraged in claims of geographically-based quality, specifically, the multi-species efforts that are marshalled in such arguments.

These themes are addressed through mixed methods doctoral fieldwork in Tokaj, Hungary (2016-2019) which foregrounded participatory soil sampling and archival research. Tokaj is the world’s second-oldest protected terroir (1737). A historically contested territory, the region has seen the rise and fall of political systems, industrialisation, invasions and land-grabs. Today, a new generation of winemakers are turning once again to the soil and its inhabitants, mining for stories that support the restoration of the former of ‘king of wines, wine of kings’.

This paper asks: which epistemes are deployed and prioritised in the reification of soil-based terroir? How do narratives of quality and regeneration index land-based mythologies and political histories alongside sensory experience and soil science? Given regimes of environmental sense-making, what are the broader social and ecological implications?

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What do compost services with co-used containers entail logistically and conceptually? Foodwaste processing bound for local soil care is on the rise. Here we focus on intersectoral soil restoration enterprises that replace ‘end-of-use’ waste bins with ‘start-of-use’ bioremediating containers. Co-usable vessels then become the biosocial currency across urban and rural parties. Once hotel chefs collect, inoculate, and store their kitchen scraps in the container; truckers transport them to the local farm; agriculturists empty them for composting before cleaning and recirculation.

Terms like zero waste or upstream innovation describe aspects of operation and valorization, but do not account for co-use as manifestation of interdependence and variability. The container, designed for continual bioremediation can reconfigure waste removal as an ecological and economical actant rather than an environmental burden. Thus, we ask how co-use as distinct vector in value creation contests functional fixations between waste, economy, and ecology in regenerative ways.

To wrestle with this question, we draw on empirical research into a Hong Kong social venture called Soil Trust. Through ethnographic fieldwork, we explore the pragmatics and challenges of operationalizing a hotel-to-farm soil regeneration enterprise using co-remediating Bokashi containers. Our analysis from participant observation, document review, and semi-structured interviews shows how versatile co-use was vital for bridging the worlds between consumer and producer, urban and rural, waste and sustenance. For Soil Trust, the co-usable containers were more than mediation devices. They became boundary objects, straddling and translating multifunctionality, including sustenance supply, microbial niche, and legitimization opportunities in the service of enlivening soils.