Paper short abstract:

The paper considers the concept of soil remediation, its assumptions and conditions through discussion of a range of artworks that re-mediate soil pollution.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

Sky inside the Soil is an artistic research project that reimagines Bitterfeld-Wolfen's industrial legacy. Utilizing archival photographs and pigments derived from polluted plants, we use silkscreen printing to re(con)textualize ideas about the more-than-human labor of environmental (re)mediation.

Paper long abstract:

Who, or what, mediates pollution, and what kind of work does that entail? Sky inside the Soil is a multi-phase, mixed-methods, artistic research project that explores the work of plants as mediators between soil and sky in more-than-human communities of extreme toxicity. Visually unravelling the tale of a brown coal mining pit turned waste-water dump in the former East German district of Bitterfeld-Wolfen, the project asks: what roles do plants assume in the time-keeping and place-making processes of ecological labour engaged in environmental remediation? And how can this specific kind of vegetal labour mediate the complex political history of a specific place-time continuum? Using multispecies ethnography, sensory site survey, and artistic research, we draw an analogy between the labour of plants and the labour of humans in the site's material history of extraction and industrial expropriation. 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 show how shifting meanings of place, labour, and multiple temporalities coalesce on site—from plant ancestors transformed into coal, to solar-punk speculations about the botanical-alterlife. Drawing on impulses from the fields of cultural geography, feminist STS, and environmental humanities, the paper weaves theoretical and practical threads to examine the more-than-human ecological labour forces at work in the ongoing remediation of a superfund site in post-socialist East Germany.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Military-Industrial Brownfield in Tel Aviv, often seen as an impediment to urban development, paradoxically fosters urban nature, proposing 'celebrated toxicity' as a concept of contamination's positive role in challenging our capitalist society's ecological degradation.

Paper long abstract:

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.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution describes the changing role and position of soil science and soil practitioners during periods of political transition. It focuses on transformation of soil knowledges and remediation practices in Kazakhstan’s dryland ecosystems during Soviet and independent history.

Paper long abstract:

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.

Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on participatory action research, government agricultural extension, soil science and smallholders, this paper discusses soil improvement through the dual articulation of materials and discourse, where articulation is messy and diverse, requiring many moments of integration.

Paper long abstract:

In a coffee-growing village in Thailand, extended smallholder households are the core bases for soil repair. Yet soil knowledge and imaginaries are slow in becoming valued amongst commodity crop farmers, despite the efforts of government agricultural extension workers. While new scientific models of soil are transforming agricultural research, extension and commerce, this enthusiasm does not reach smallholder farmers who experience fractious histories with the state.

This paper brings together two methodological moments: long-term fieldwork in the village shaped by participatory action research, and a month of fieldwork and interviews with the Land Development Thailand’s soil chemistry lab for farmers. Focusing on the government extension worker, I consider the obstructions he faces. Real improvement of soil that farmers can see involves the dual articulation of materials and discourse, where articulation is messy and diverse, requiring many moments of integration.

Building on Stuart Hall’s notion of articulation, this paper shows how soil articulates new affinities and cross-cutting solidarities between ethnic minority highland farmers and government soil scientists from the provinces. It discusses the use of participatory action research in examining the mediation/translation of knowledge. I argue that soil health as a boundary object in the preparation of a workshop/gathering in the village, offers a way to understand how a different era of the scaled local, where it meets appropriate technology, is emerging. This is a repair of soil’s materiality, and a repair of knowledge: intergenerational, south-south and south-north, and how ethnography has dealt with agrarian knowledge in Thailand.

Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic fieldwork with soil-food-web practitioners, growers, and scientists in Italy, I suggest how emergent practices and imaginaries of soil repair can ‘compost’ Green Revolution technosciences in what I characterize as ‘grass/roots’ re-mediations and relationalities.

Paper long abstract:

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.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the agricultural practice of fallowing as an ecological and diplomatic buffer or mediator, enacting forms of soil remediation through more or less violent negotiations with a host of nonhuman lives at the margins of agriculture.

Paper long abstract:

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.

Paper short abstract:

The seca disease destroys numerous oaks in the Spanish dehesa as its fungus-like pathogen spreads rapidly in the soils of the overgrazed woodland pastures. Meanwhile, holistic management redirects farmers' gaze to the soil, rekindling ethnographic questions of vision, temporality and compensation.

Paper long abstract:

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.

Paper short abstract:

Organic manure is part of a soil repair assemblage. Based on fieldwork in the Moroccan Souss, the paper explores the social life of manure from its origin in agro-forestry to its use in industrial cash crop production and the concomitant transformations of multispecies relationalities.

Paper long abstract:

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.

Paper short abstract:

We reflect on the co-use of composting containers based on collective actions – providing for reciprocal use – whereby soil care is made to matter and kept alive. It is regenerative. It provokes a sociality, temporality, and cyclability that attunes to what comes before and after that: living soils.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on empirical research into a compost venture in Hong Kong called Soil Trust. We study the pragmatics and challenges of a kitchen-to-soil regeneration enterprise using co-remediating fermentation containers. Our analysis from participant observation, document review, and 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-use of composting containers was based on providing for mutual use whereby soil care is made to matter and kept alive. It provokes a sociality, temporality, and cyclability that attunes to what comes before and after that: living soils.

Compost services with co-used containers for processing food waste into soil sustenance gain prominence. Replacing ‘end-of-use’ waste bins with co-usable fermentation vessels facilitates the transformation of organic matter into soil care across urban and rural parties. Once chefs collect and inoculate their kitchen scraps in the container, truckers transport them to the farm, and agriculturists empty them for composting before cleaning and recirculation.

The moving compost container brings to life the idea of co-use as a manifestation of complicity and variability. Such movements are not captured in terms like zero-waste or upstream innovation and only partially describe how these services work. The containers – designed for continuous, soil-directed breakdown – change we think about waste removal, turning it into an ecological enactment rather than an environmental burden. We explore how co-use as a distinct mediator in value creation straddles functional fixations of waste, economy, society, and ecology.