TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Soil is the realm of dirt, decay, and the dire dangers of hell. While some human cultures revered and sanctified soil as terra, our common home, the multispecies environment/super-organism in which we must all dwell together (Ingold 2000), in Western, Modern societies’ ideals of purity, cleanliness, and light have brought the majority of humans to actively reject the ground underneath our feet, striving rather towards the heavens (see e.g. Montag 2017). To soar is to be free; to be immersed in soil is to be buried, connoting death, degradation, containment. We are physically unable to penetrate far into this realm, having to tunnel our way, often with invasive blasts, if we desire to go below the surface.  

Delving into this dirty underworld is thus per definition taboo, something we are actively untaught from early childhood. And yet (or consequently), a number of artists are seeking to encounter soils in radical ways, from Amy Youngs’ VR exploration of the question “what is it like to be a springtail?”, via Maria Viftrup’s soil sensing, ranging from scientific sampling to the simple, yet difficult act of sticking her head into the soil for as long as possible, to Annike Flo’s explorations of the queer eroticisms of microbial encounters.

Slowing down and sinking into the dark, dull, brown stuff of the earth, as argued e.g. by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2015), has the potential to overturn Modern, future-oriented, hasty temporalities, engendering liminal notions of care and new modes of attentiveness to a more-than-human environment (Krzywoszynska 2019; Haraway 2016). More radically than the laborious yet comforting act of human hands digging into soil, artistic penetrations of the soil barrier potentially overturn everyday perspectives and uncomfortably place the audience into the foreign land underground.

Whilst the concept of transcendence is intimately linked to the ideal of soaring into the heavens, the proposed paper will take the above as a starting point in exploration of how artscience projects that seek to transgress realms can also be considered as sublime, as that which approaches the threshold: not upwards, rather downwards and inwards.

References:

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge.

Krzywoszynska, A. (2019). Caring for soil life in the Anthropocene: The role of attentiveness in more-than-human ethics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(4), 661-675. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12293

Montag, D. (2017). Thinking soil. Interalia Magazine (April). https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/daro-montag/

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2015). Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care. Social Studies of Science, 45(5), 691-716. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715599851

Please note: This abstract was first submitted and accepted for the Malta TTT2023. I was prevented from attending when I broke my knee two days before the conference, and am hoping for another occasion to develop this line of thought in the best of company at TTT2025.