SOIL
Image courtesy Rebecca Lupton Photography
Soil, from the earth we turn over on our vegetable plots, to the mud clogging our walking boots, contains a multitude of properties that are essential to a healthily functioning biosphere. The ‘dirty’ or ‘dusty’ appearance of soil belies its nature as a highly dynamic living entity - a rich web of rock particles, decaying organic matter, roots, fungi and microorganisms. The soil microbiota constitutes the greatest reservoir and donor of microbial diversity on earth. As a vast bioreactor of myriad chemical reactions that recycle wastes, purify water, recycle nutrients and store carbon, soil plays a vital role in maintaining the delicate balance of life on earth and sustaining the human race. The production of more than 95% of the food we eat relies on (healthy) soil. Yet climate change, the spread of intensive agriculture, deforestation and industrial activity have accelerated the degradation and loss of soils in almost every country in the world. Erosion, compaction, nutrient imbalance, pollution, acidification, water logging, loss of soil biodiversity and increasing salinity reduce soil's ability to support plant life and the growing of crops. In the recent publication A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet,(Yale Univ. Press (2021) microbiologist Jo Handelsman and environmental researcher Kayla Cohen present a pressing case for each and everyone of us to engage with caring for soil. But how do we begin to do so?
Working with artists and researchers Rachel Pimm, Sneha Solanki, Mel Woods, The Manchester Ear, Keith Attenborough and Shahram Taherzadeh the programme for Beer & Berries 2022 attempted to share knowledge and practical know-how of how to engage more closely with the complexities of soil. Using a sensory engagement with the materiality of soil - from feeling the structure of different soil types to listening to the sounds of the soil and reflecting upon the history and poetics of composted earth to start to build a foundation for a future caring relationship.
OBSERVING
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Still from Soils-Habit-Plants, 2018, Mikhail Lylov and Elke Marhöfer
Still from Soils-Habit-Plants, 2018, Mikhail Lylov and Elke Marhöfer
Soils-Habit-Plants
We invited artists Mikhail Lylov and Elke Marhöfer to screen their 2018 film Soils-Habit-Plants in Hospitalfield's restored Fernery. The film presents a series of intricate details of three different plants and their environments, discovering the individual plants’ habits and documenting how they contract themselves with the elements of soil, water and air. This intimate and immediate observation is interrupted by two reference-images: a historical photograph and results of the soil conditions’ laboratory test, bringing to bear wider questions on propagation, agriculture and pressing concerns of soil health.
Mikhail Lylov is an artist and researcher based in Sicily and Berlin. His projects propose various practical, theoretical, and artistic interpretations of ecology. Working with moving, photographic, and archival images, he investigates histories of the interaction between human, animal, and elemental protagonists responsible for the emergence of various environments.
Elke Marhöfer is an artist and farmer based in Berlin and Sicily. She investigates ecological practices that support human and nonhuman communities. In her film works she tests nonhuman perspectives, translating a technology like the camera from a human cultural and technical device into an environmentally intensive force. In this way, the camera becomes a tool principally undifferentiated from nonhuman animal tools, and filming becomes akin to orangutans using leaves to make squeaky kiss noises.
Still from Soils-Habit-Plants, 2018, Mikhail Lylov and Elke Marhöfer
EATING THINGS
In addition to the detailed observation of Soils-Habitas-Plants, Beer & Berries regular contributor Sneha Solanki developed an iteration of her ongoing project EATING THINGS in relation to the soil theme. Accompanied by her two children Rasa and Sona, Sneha invited participants to ‘search’ and ‘gather’ wild or non-cultivated plants and fungus from within the Hospitalfield site. Closely observing and noting what they found the group was encouraged to share knowledge and learn from others participating on the edible, medical and harmful plants and fungus found outside of conventional food systems.
EATING THINGS has grown out from a family project documenting the journey of two children as they start to learn and eat edible ‘things’ from ‘outside’. Starting in 2010 when the eldest child was a year old, the project became a method to ‘grow’ knowledge as the children grew. The project has extended out an intergenerational project to grow, deepen and develop knowledge and culture through shared learning.
GROW Observatory
Further considering a close looking Professor Mel Woods, Design and Making, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design gave a talk on the citizen science project GROW Observatory. GROW invited whole communities to undertake regular observations on soil and climate across Europe. Using ground based soil sensors to record data communities contributed to improving the accuracy of predictions on extreme events, such as flood, drought and wildfire. You can find out more about The Grow Observatory here.
Sneha Solanki, EATING THINGS 2020
LISTENING
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Ryebank Fields, Sound Walk with The Manchester Ear
A Grounding in Sound
Feast invited Ryan Woods and Hayley Suviste of The Manchester Ear to explore the environment of Hospitalfield through listening practices and acoustic technologies. Focusing on the sounds of the site they guided a participatory workshop where those attending engaged with the more than human environment – the acoustic connections between plants, soil, structures and bodies.
Ryan Woods is a sound artist and electroacoustic composer. His work explores place, ecology and community using fixed media, soundscape composition, field recordings and sound walks. He is currently undertaking a PhD in electroacoustic composition at the University of Manchester. He runs The Manchester Ear with Hayley Suviste.
Hayley Suviste is a sound artist and composer who regularly works across field recording, archival sound, electronic hardware and live instrumentation, creating music as a means to explore community and culture. Alongside her compositional work, Hayley works for The Radiophonic Institute as the lead producer of the Sound of the Year Awards and the assistant producer of The Oram Awards, as well as being a Graduate Research Assistant at the Open University under Dr Manuella Blackburn.
Hayley and Ryan founded The Manchester Ear to encourage communities to listen to the environment on excursions in and around the city. The project fosters greater involvement, understanding and appreciation for the locale, exploring ideas of acoustic ecology and deep listening while highlighting the well-being benefits for those taking part in soundwalks.
The Manchester Ear have been working with Feast developing a long term recording project at Fallowfield Secret Garden as part of Feasts ongoing Botanical Library Project
Sounding Out Soils & Crops
Emeritus Professor Keith Attenborough from The Institute of Acoustics, The Open University and Associate Professor Shahram Taherzadeh from the School of Engineering and Innovation, The Open University shared their current research into "soil acoustics". A rapidly developing field, soil acoustics entails taking acoustic measurements of soil surfaces to gain data on soil quality, water retention and texture in a non invasive manner.
Near its surface, soil is porous. Both water retention and root growth depend on soil porosity. Sound waves generated in the air penetrate the pores in the soil and so measurements of reflection from the surface can be used to determine aspects the pore structure without disturbing the soil. The ease with which air can move in and out of the surface depends on its permeability which is important also for the movement of water in soil. Vibrations of the soil surface made by airborne sound are very small but large enough to be detected by Laser Doppler Vibrometers so they can be used non-invasively to monitor soil structure in the field informing projections of crop yield.
Emeritus Professor in the School of Engineering and Innovation at The Open University, Keith Attenborough has published research on acoustics related to agriculture since 1990 collaborating with the former Silsoe Research Institute, Rothamsted Research, the University of Mississippi and the National Sedimentation Laboratory of the US Department of Agriculture. He has acted as a work package leader for research conducted as part of an EC funded project involving Universities and research laboratories in Europe and Scandinavia and concerned with the use of natural means such as vegetation for reducing noise from surface transport.
Shahram Taherzadeh is Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering and Innovation at the Open University, has extensive experience of acoustic measurements, and instrumentation and appropriate numerical methods. He has collaborated with Keith on many projects over many years including the deduction of the acoustical properties of the ground from short-range propagation data, modeling acoustic-to-seismic coupling, predicting outdoor sound propagation, acoustic-seismic detection of buried objects and predicting ground vibrations from airborne explosions.
REFLECTING
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Rachel Pimm, LAND LITERACY Beer&Berries 2022
LAND LITERACY
Artist Rachel Pimm led a gentle and reflective outdoor creative writing workshop which aimed to reframe environmental literacy, literature and language in accessible ways for all.
"British landscapes and the English language are both rife with harmful metaphors which without attention might reinforce ableist, classist, racist, other oppressive attitudes deriving from extractivist and capitalist values and properties of natural resources, and the imperial logic of binomial naming, to give but a few examples. Together, borrowing texts from other writers also motivated by writing differently about power structures and nature, we will slow down, observe and listen; to the soil, rocks, organisms, flora, fauna, habitats, climate - to collectively create words and reflections to better reflect our bodies and local ecologies"
The workshop forms part of a wider enquiry Rachel Pimm is working on; the life cycle and death of the metaphor in nature writing with Arts Catalyst Sheffield. Rachel's ongoing practice entails works with words, objects and photography to research material stories with a focus on the animal, vegetable and mineral as they transform. Her recent UK projects, most of which are collaborative, have been in programmes including Artangel, Focal Point, The Serpentine Galleries, and Whitechapel Gallery.
Rachel's workshop for Beer & Berries was further developed and adapted during a micro residency at Hospitalfield for their public programme at The New Scriptorium. Throughout Scotlands Year of Stories Hospitalfield have hosted writers’ residencies, workshops, events and readings in the Scriptorium at Arbroath Abbey.
BEYOND FEAST
A further highlight of the day included the first iteration of a new work by artist Rehana Zaman under the working title Rubus. Orientated around rubus fruits (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries), the project takes up a multi-dimensional conversation on the social currencies and economies of modern agriculture. Encompassing moving image and performance, the work invited writers and poets Seán Elder, Nat Raha and Daniella Valz Gen to dialogue with Al Qazwini’s The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existing Things; an influential work of Islamic cosmography from the 12th century. The newly commissioned texts orientated upon how relationships to land, configured through capital, are subverted and felt. The project was initiated in 2020-1 as part of the Hospitalfield’s Studio Time Commissions, supporting artists with funded time to develop ideas and research for new art works to be presented at Hospitalfield. Zaman has extensively researched with cultivators local to Hospitalfield in Arbroath to examine the enduring legacies of colonial capitalist land use and ownership in the UK from multinational monopolies on farming practices and plant patents, to the relationship between the Scottish clearances and plantations in South Asia.
Accompanying Feast's programme developed in partnership with Hospitalfield, Beer & Berries 2022 presented the inaugural Angus Growers Talks Tent – intended to give audiences the chance to hear from local producers about growing in the region. Angus Growers & Angus Soft Fruits is a soft fruit producer organisation based in Arbroath on the East Coast of Scotland, in the heart of the traditional Scottish berry growing area. The Company is owned and managed by 17 growers, the majority in Angus, Perthshire and Fife, who grow a variety of fruits and other crops; Angus Growers market their strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries and cherries. They specialise in producing fresh fruit for the major supermarkets, shops, restaurants and food and drinks manufacturers. During the day, speakers covered a range of subjects around farming, growing, soil and sustainability practices in farming.