TANK Magazine Q&A: The Understory of the Understory
With Filipa Ramos
December 2020
Irina Petrova, The X-Files. Ecological Disaster in an Industrial Wonderland, 2020 (detail)
Guy Mackinnon-Little What is soil? If I reach into the earth and pick up a handful of dense, teeming earth, what am I holding?
Lucia Pietroiusti That was kind of our problem in putting together this event, as we realised that as soon as you pick up this clump of something, and you hold it as something like soil or land or ground, it carries with it a whole universe of different constellations of economics, ecologies, politics and so on. So while holding this thing, we thought we could speak with biologists, mycologists and ecologists about so many of the issues that are embedded in it: how toxic it is, what life forms exist within it or what kinds of collaborations are needed for it to even exist. And then as we held it, we realised that the politics of land itself are complex and contested and that there’s this huge anthropological or philosophical question of to what extent we live with our feet on the ground. Earth comes from the Proto-Indo-European word for soil. It grows as a term to mean a planet, but somehow it starts from a clump. We did the same thing with the event.
Filipa Ramos Your question is interesting because it’s very graphic. What comes to mind is multiple layers of television and cinematic imaginary of a human hand grabbing a clump of soil. On the one hand (ha), soil remains invisible, because the transactions, the operations of transformation of matter, the worms, the microorganisms, the mycelium networks, the humidity, the temperature, the temporalities that together constitute the incredible entity that soil is are invisible in this hand that grasps the earth. On the other hand, throughout this research, we’ve been learning immensely from soil scientists how much we humans need to reduce such a huge entity as soil, which is like the skin of this planet, onto a scale that is proportionate to our own body.