terra testimony: soil as a living archive
Terra Testimony, part of the larger Feral Palace project in its first iteration, actively engages participants in sensorial narratives that foreground and make sensible the microbial life of soil and its necessity for human survival. This project rethinks human-soil belonging in ways that open insurgent and hopeful ecological futures. Terra Testimony redistributes frames of visibility, audibility, and patterns of intelligibility that have the capacity to create new alliances and forms of action, generating “new communities of sense." Through an artistic exploration of soil diversity, this work speculates and examines how microbial deep earth acts as a bio-archive, a place of generative decay, and a site of reliance.
This project explores multispecies worldbuilding on an increasingly paved-over Earth, and through this work we consider how to make visible the rich and exuberant multispecies micro-entanglements beneaththe built environment. Terra Testimony embraces a living systems approach to storytelling and speculative fabulation that expands our imaginaries of justice-based futures. Through observing, listening, and sensing, this project offers opportunities to study the livelihoods of tiny, soil-based communities by inviting you to see and hear—to experience—the aliveness of soil.
Specifically, this project creates an opening, a hole, a rupture in the pavement, that provides a view through the human built environment into the vibrant ecosystem of the soil that lives beneath. This opening provides a forum for study and learning where people can interact with the soil using the ‘sensor kit’ we are creating. This kit extends perceptual capacities so publics and practitioners can listen and view the life of the earth that is concealed, and often curtailed, by the built environment. Along with creating a space where the soil can appear (and be heard and be seen and be felt), this project provides pedagogical programming and hands-on experimentation to generate new narratives and relationships both between and beyond the human.
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