Mama, Soil, and Spirit is a collaboration with soil that contemplates relationality with non-human entities.

Anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism have led to a planetary crisis and are undergirded by a nature/culture divide. To have any hope of avoiding an existential confrontation with the forces of our planetary ecology, the human must be decentered in our consciousness. In their transforming, humbling, and re-enchanting ways of relating to the more-than-human world, animisms provide necessary alternatives.

Indigenous animist ontologies such as Ojibwe or Shintoism are holistic and inclusive, seeing planetary health as inseparable from human health. When we embrace animist perspectives, we understand that mountains, stones, and soil are all kin. They are alive and possess generative dynamism. 

The sensory activation inherent to animism can allow new ways of seeing and mapping our entanglements with non-human and nonliving entities. One can learn by contemplating a handful of soil and considering the billions of beings that compose the below-ground microbiome and the thousands of genetic remnants of extinct ancient animals and plants.

In Mama, Soil, and Spirit, I attempt to express the poetry of relationality by collaborating on an interactive artwork with the soil itself. My method of engaging with a non-human neighbor is to access humidity and temperature values via soil sensors using these inputs to shape the dynamics in p5.js sketches. Through the transformations and pulses produced by the changing state of the soil, a liberating, healing recognition of different temporalities and movements, non-human and non-living forces, both organic and inorganic, is produced.

Within the animations is video documentation of soil and holes dug in the earth captured with borescope cameras. These images are layered atop video of a Butoh performance to frustrate and upend the “above-ground” sense of time and space. Within each component of the installation, rocks are positioned as mamas that move in deep time, the soil as the child of the rock, and holes as a spirit, defined by the absence of material. Rocks are the maternal material, weathered over millions of years to create soil. Soil is the fragile child, facing degradation and erosion, and it is the connection between rock and all life. Holes, ontological parasites, are our spirit portal to the below-ground world. 

This collaboration with the soil takes the form of an installation. The soil is arrayed upon the presentation space with LCD screens planted into it facing up to the spectator. Since we are primed to look at screens as portals, accepting them as windows into other worlds, as virtual cavities, here they are holes and within holes. I recontextualize our habituated relationship with screens to evoke animistic mentalities, the dynamism of the microbiome, and technology's relationship to its maternal materials. This positioning of the screen also conversely draws attention to the materiality of screens and the digital technologies that rely on the minerals and precious metals extracted from the earth to project us into virtual spaces.