Voicing the soil is modular. Each
piece offers a critical way to view the project and all the modules ‘talk’ to
each other and affect the audience.
There are four objects in a broad
spectrum of media including
-a handmade geological section of Wales and
England, showing Hereford
-a newspaper published in 2119
and set in the future Federation of the Marches
-a climate walk in the future
taking place anywhere
A. Changes to the
project
Voicing the soil is
interdisciplinary. On the art side it involves five collaborators including a
calligrapher, a technical illustrator, a watercolourist and a graphic and sound
designer. They are part of the precariat in Herefordshire, one of the features
of the Anthropocene. They author the project and sign it as JUST DUST.
1. From
palimpsest to infographic. Each art discipline has its own material
constraints. These dictated some of the project outcomes. For example,
originally all the calligraphy was to be overwritten on the geographical
features creating a palimpsest. This would have meant writing at angles that
were impossible for the calligrapher. There was also the difficulty of applying
colour washes over calligraphic ink, with the risk of bleeding. The solution
was to produce something close to an infographic.
2. Conditions of making. Starting from the strata configured by
engineer William Smith’s Geological Section From
London to Snowdon (1817), I had planned to represent the conditions of
making the strata of the Anthropocene. However this could not be made. As a metaphor and de facto, JUST DUST added
the new layer of the Anthropocene to Smith’s map. This layer brings with it the
social, gendered and generational inequalities of this new geological epoch
also called the ‘Capitalocene (Moore, 2015). My original plan was to ask the
highly-skilled makers to write short biographies to enable a glimpse into their
lives, with the revelation - perhaps shocking to some - that they are part of
the precariat. There were two problems. First, some were reluctant to do this.
Second, those biographies were in danger of overloading the piece. Given the
constraints of energy, deadlines, and budget, I have decided that it is not
possible to do full justice to this within this project. One of the newspaper
articles reflects on the treatment of equally skilled farmers by exploitative
supermarkets in an article about ‘repeasantation’. The shift from the word ‘farmer’
to that of ‘peasant’ creates a tension. The aim is to highlight questions of
ownership of the land and in turn, raises the question of the gig economy in
farming.
3. Critiquing the idea of the Anthropocene. The project intended to
develop a critical approach to representing the Anthropocene. Writings by
proponents of this new epoch, Bruno Latour and Dona Haraway take the Anthropocene
as granted. And so did my initial project, the map in particular. However regarding
humans as a biological and geological force is not a new idea. This is
supported by Christophe Bonneuil, a historian of science. Bonneuil sees a
pattern of continuity rather than a break leading to the Anthropocene (2016). Bonneuil
rejects the notion of the advent of the Anthropocene because the symptoms and
agents responsible for that damage continue to be the same. These recurring
problems, from C18 onwards, manifest themselves nowdays on a larger scale.
Given this understanding, how to represent the
Anthropocene critically to include this strand, continuity, in the Soil project?
a. Continuity is represented by showing a hand-made
map. If I had used a Google map, the representation would have suggested a
break, which would be false to my understanding of the concept.
b. The possibility for a viewer to identify with
the hands of the map makers is probable and so is their identification with the
familiar geographical location of Hereford sited on the map which also aims to
acquaint the audience to a local knowledge that is continuous, felt and lived.
c. Using a mock newspaper
fictionally printed in 2119 helps trigger reflections on 2019 and its ‘early
map of the Anthropocene’. The newspaper is a staging of the map, a ‘mise en
abyme’, a playful duplication of the idea of the Anthropocene with a twist: the
newspaper reveals the power relations at play in the 2019 map, how various
conflicts of social interests manifested themselves: private property, the
commons, and their effects on the bigger ecological predicaments of 2019.
The newspaper is a flow of
objective facts - in the Map Key - combined to the subjective or opinionated
and lyrical tone of articles authored by various voices who provide new
metaphors for environmental and economic sustainability. The 2119 utopia is
also a dystopia with its ideology and system of representations. Darker sides
reveal conflicts with farmers who have become peasants and Nobel prize winners
rather than money receive an upgrade to their social credit rating.
B. Emergences in the project
Voicing the soil is modular and all the modules ‘talk’ to
each other and affect the audience.
1.Time. What is revealed from this conversation between the
different modules is the absence of a fixed time. For example, when one looks
at the hand painted geological map, it weaves together the deep past that
extends behind you and contemporary references such as Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring which started the ecological movement in the 1960s.
However this experience of the map is punctured by the
newspaper, which re-contextualises the map in 2119 to shift to an imagined
future time. This shifting experience of time creates a feeling of ambiguity
and ephemerality. This allows the viewer to imagine several possible realities.
The Climate Walk game has a similar effect because it is a
request to travel into the future to imagine what future repercussions your
behaviour will have.
The soundscape, Old Red Sandstone does the opposite and
takes you back into deep time, as the map does. In sum, Voicing the Soil is
polyphonic and enables people to view soil in the Anthropocene from unusual
angles.
C. Changes lead to new research and
new outputs
1. New
philosophers. I really shifted my
understanding of the Anthropocene from Donna Haraway’s coupling of
humans/non-humans (2016) and Bruno Latour ’nature does not exist’ (1991) to
Virginie Maris who argues that: ‘the destructive patterns of contemporary
societies may lie in the hierarchy between humans and non-humans much more than
in the recognition of separate realms between culture and nature.’ (2017).
Virginie Maris’ idea is visible in the Newspaper
recording the successful rewilding of nature with a picture of a healthy wolf. Her idea also informs the soundscapes which
include side by side two realms that of:
- scientists dealing with nature (culture) in Spiders
Sex Pheromone and The Old Red Sandstone
-nature represented in its own right in Amphibians and
Anonymous where creatures continue their own life underneath our feet, unseen.
