Remember soil

Remember soil

When you walk across the land, do you ever think about the soil beneath your feet – where it comes from, what it has experienced, or what stories it holds within it?  But is the soil worthless dirt, or is it full of mystery?  Like an old wise woman, the soil preserves the history of our planet and the possibilities for a sustainable future. Just like a library, the soil houses stories, written in the  microscopically small to the grand landscape, about the history of humanity. Our enormous recent impact, from the global nitrogen cycle to our use of nuclear weapons, can be read as elemental and isotopic traces in the soil.

Ultimately, everything becomes soil, to dust we shall return. But nature also does the opposite. Soil is not just dead matter. Soil becomes human.

We are stardust, that became our planet, a planet that harbored life in its waters, life that grew on the rocks of the earth, rocks that exchanged with the microorganisms of the earth to feed the progress of biology, which slowly formed the soil of the earth, from which increasingly advanced life grew, stretched, crawled, twisted, and made its way. To us, the thinking human, the walking microbiome.

From this dance, somehow, the human mind and the human heart emerge. No one knows the whole picture. Our collective historical forgetting has fatal consequences. Let us remember it anew.

We must re-examine the deep relationships between soil, land, and people. This may be the last chance to listen. The last chance to restore the balance. The last chance to offer and receive healing.

"Remember soil " is an installation of 3 sculptures . I made this for the Wondergronds art festival 2026.