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.

In my research method I take a performative stance, tuning into the thread of experiences that stream and unfold as things move forward
The dramaturgy echoes the peculiarities of the terrain, its limitations and its potentials
I am both a wanderer, navigating the unexpected twists and turns of the journey, and an agent, constantly negotiating my trajectories and their matter
Tim Ingold uses the expression doing-undergoing1, which I could relate to

I'm in constant negotiation with the world, not as an external realm, but as immanent in my embodied perception of it
In my research travels, the world in which I act and myself as I act speak the same language, which Tim Ingold beautifully puts as "othering into togethering, interaction into correspondence, intention rooted in attention" 2

today I went to explore future gardening at Onkruidenier's Shadow Garden project, which "performs rituals as a language to lead the visitor into an in-between space (...) into the shadows of plants, organisms, soil and earth systems"
in their "test environment" they challenge the eco-modernist tradition of the Floriade 3

I plunged into an attentive gesture of digging in the ground, discovering what is shadowed between its strata

the lives lying there, their trajectories, their temporalities... caught me between feelings of intrusion and fascination

about half a metre below, we fell onto a geotextile that separated the top layer of soil, which was a slightly sandy, deep brown colour mixed with decomposing organic matter
and a thick layer of damp, sticky, insubstantial clay
a few more holes led us to a third level, about a metre deep, where the soil was light, much more sandy and mixed with organic matter, earthworms, but also tiny bits of modern debris

As I reached out to touch different levels of soil, I encountered a processed, sterilised, and probably fertilised matter, which led me to question whether these processes abstract it
trapping it in a mere material
seperated from its geography

geology

history
narratives
political stance

what is my position as a researcher and collector of soil samples from which the ADN has been erased?
what does it mean for me to give each of my collections a coordinate, a name and a story, acknowledging that it's actual story has been sterilised?
Is it a claim of authorship that romanticizes a matter that transcends any sense of authorship, ownership and possession per se?
what would it be like to de-collect? as a gesture of dispossession

would this action put me in a different essentialist position, claiming innocence, stepping back, denying my agency, my part in a power relationship that is imminent by my very being?

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