if the soil speaks by rym

ارض حريه كرامه وطنيه land, freedom، collective dignity a slogan that has been with me for a long time, since the revolutionary moment in Tunisia in 2010, when we raised it in the protests, wrote it on the walls, banners that we held high, we sang and shouted it, it recurred in our writings, in our conversations, in our dreams of the sovereignty and independence of our lands. today I see, we see, houses bombed, falling down, turned into dust, piles of stones, dirt. the land carries it all, embraces the decay and transforms it. Down there, other times lie, invisible, suspended from the narratives of control and structures of oppression that dominate the realm above. in the past semester, perhaps even years, I have turned my attention to the interstices in cities that have been created, or rather overrun, by the political programming of urban spaces. They have become areas that have no specific function, no specific production value, no active role in the web of trajectories, signals, instructions, restrictions, power relations... they are just there immanent I like to go there, to step aside from the flow of traffic, to stand in the in-between corners that people hardly look at. I am always wandering, wondering how I can inhabit them, reconvert them, activate their performative potential, claim other times and relations that neutralise or reverse the dominant narratives around me. I took the act of strolling as a ritual, a method. I looked and all I found was dirt, soil, biomass, decaying debris, stones inhabited by microscopic organisms, a complex stratum composed of various "others". everything felt connected and embedded in itself. robert smithson wrote in an article: "the city gives the illusion that the earth does not exist. but what I saw was a symbiosis of things we often see as separate, they grow, they evolve, they shift as a one, a network of self-organising systems. There's no master, no slave. I saw in the land a biosphere highly charged with inter-independent times, stories, histories, memories, dreams, identities, homes, belonging, roots... they are all there, traces of our past, inherited from our ancestors, and of our present, which we define ourselves. monday, half past nine, the air is slightly aggressive, my hands are cold, I am collecting soil in this area behind the railway. I haven't broken any laws I promise, I haven't jumped any barriers, I've just been following the side of the canal. I don't really choose where I stop, the ground calls me, I respond. I walked to the back of this area that has no title, I found a small door hidden behind the herbs. It opened onto a cemetery, beautiful and quiet. I remembered Michel Faucault and his concept of heterotopia, which also fascinated me during the first semester. he described them as spaces absolutely other, the city's sacred and immortal wind. I saw in the in-between spaces of the city what I call heterotopias, a land for altered human and non-human relations, friday, february is almost over. spring is shyly approaching, I could see and touch it as I bent down to collect some earth. today I had an encounter with a microscopic, translucent creature. I've observed so much autonomy and self-sufficiency through it. vivieros de castro, a brazilian anthropologist interested in the amazonian cosmologies and amerindian perspectivism (the way in which humans, animals, and spirits see both themselves and one another, an idea that suggests a redefinition of the classical categories of « nature », « culture », « super nature » based on the concept of perspective). said in one of his lectures: "the experience that each 'self' has of the 'other' can, however, be radically different from the experience that the 'other' has of its own appearance and practices." -- Lecture 1, p. 51 it seems to me that when we turn our gaze to our other, non-human selves, who perceive reality from a different perspective, within a very different temporality, we learn so much about how the world is of relative semblances, for example, what is solid earth to us is airy sky to the beings who inhabit the strata below us, and what is airy sky to us is solid earth to those who inhabit the strata above us. it is a world of relative semblances, where different kinds of beings see the same things differently. in the last few years, before coming to the Netherlands, i've been volunteering on organic farms, dynamising the soil, collecting and redistributing biomass, planting wild forests... this has taught me a lot about how what happens in the soil can influence what happens above it, in terms of self-organising structures, symbiosis and, above all, solidarity. these last few months have also taught me that solidarity comes with love, it's hard to relate to the feeling without having love as a drive.

9pm

I look through the frame of my bed towards the windows

the daylight flickers gently over my eyes

the sun is playing hide and seek

It's going to be a playful day

I think

that sunday my friend and I went to the Boos for a picnic a relaxed walk and the joy of eating together

I couldn't imagine my sunday going any other way

not until we started cycling together for the first time with alec

they knew the area well

I didn't have to worry about relying on my phone's voice that could barely keep up with my sense of direction and erratic pace

perhaps it’s just me who can't quite sync with it

It's funny how

the robotic, feminine, one-tone voice gets caught in a rapid, repetitive, breaking loop as if shouting with a fragile throat: "faire demi-tour, faire demi-t, prenez la direction sud-ouest et faire dem i t pr dans 200 metres prenez johan huizangalan et faire demi-tour".

I took a break that sunday

with alec It was something like what the situationists called L'Amour Fou

" who walks with me in this hour without leading me and whom, moreover, I do not lead?"1

members of the situationist movement adopted dérive as a tactic to explore the city

they had to drop any habit or tendency from everyday life

they called themselves psychogeographers

"seeing the city as a psychogeographical relief that they navigated in a playful-constructive movement alert to the attraction of the terrain and the encounters they found there"2

with alec

we followed our intuition attentive to each other's responses

no particular "order" was set we simply followed the path that seemed more attractive to us

when we reached havenstraat he urged us down a specific road that he described as "a path that would fit us"

I drifted

we jumped a couple of fences to cross the Havenstraat site, a depot complex dating back to 1914 originally built by the city tram company which over the years has become a kaleidoscope of painters collectors craftsmen second-hand stands public events and gatherings

it's one of these spaces in the interstices of cities that are created by circumstances by the accumulation of experiences throughout time and

policies

these shadowed spaces are overlooked, bypassed and unconsidered nooks and crannies"3

the psychogeographic "slopes » (plaques tournantes) « switching stations from which one could be pulled by the city in many different directions »

was for us the first gardener we encountered

« it’s closed, they’re taking it down, the whole complex »

his argument to keep us out felt like an urgency to get a taste of it before it faded into the politics of urban planning

we flighted the lines4

a few hours later and after a few detours, drifts, valuable finds and wanderings

we ended up in the boos

sharing a meal and exploring the wild edible plants

while i was foraging white garlic and stingy nettle

taking some sample of the different tones of the soil i was discovering

i started seeing in this decomposing organic matter

a moment of

in-betweenness

interval

where the past falls into its ultimate becoming

decay

of an organic matter, almost unnoticeable, fading into its microcosm

decay

of the spaces in-between

overpowered by the urban landscape

metamorphosis

a state of decomposition

where the history

dissolves

into

oblivion

yet

the traces remain

on the walls

on the stones

in the ground

fossils

of the manifold strata of times and spaces

and politics

the earth as i see it

a polyphony of vocabularies

of testemonies

if it speaks

what would it reveal

land

at the very heart of wars

conflicts

genocide

ecocide

if we learn how to listen

without being a spokesman

what would we find out

about a history of which the narration

isn’t

altered

by an anthropocentric grammar

what am I listening to?

How can we understand the relationality embodied in soil?

when things come apart and back together in a constant motion

What stories does it carry?

few days later, I learned that not too deep down there is a geotextile that separates the "original soil" which is polluted from the one on the surface

which is itself trapped in multiple histories of colonialism and imperialist extractive power relations

?!?

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