Session #114

– Paper Presentations –

Lixiviation happens when soil is disturbed. Minerals are moved by water, ground forces or chemical processes, reshaping landscapes as a subsurface level. The impacts can be devastating for anything reliant on soil for nourishment, as toxins are introduced, and nutrients removed. Architectural practice in its modern, normative modes has taken for granted its license to leach soil, and erased these impacts from its representations. The worst impacts are moreover aligned in places with the most vulnerable and impoverished communities, and where resources are taken with the least resistance.

This session calls for histories, theories and case studies that reconstitute architecture, broadly taken to include scales of landscape and urban design, as a potentially reparative practice for damaged soil. They would take into account the work, whether historical or contemporary, of landscape practitioners including Teresa Gali-Izard, theorist/researchers Maria Puig de al Bellacasa and Vandana Shiva, and decolonial agronomists Amílcar Cabral and JJ Machoabane amongst others. It further acknowledges and asks for consideration of the temporal lives of buildings and their adjacent environments in relation to soil life, for which modern architecture’s inability to decompose is a weakness. In building relations rather than edifices, as Filipa César (2018) notes in relation to Cabral, humus and humility are associated terms.

Papers, including records of performative and speculative work are invited on topics including:

Architecture and allied practices in the constitution of soil communities in time and space, especially in resisting contamination and alienation of soil wealth;

Projects of documenting shifts in representing soil relations, such as moving from surface knowledge to subsurface understandings of its contamination and repair;

Historical and theoretical lenses on projects that reclaim the quality and quantity of living soils through revisiting damaged places;

Reframing definitions of architecture from apart from soil, to a practice of its care and repair; and

Afterlives of mining and mono-cropped places in the global South.