group assignment with
Julien Jousse
WiSe 2023
becoming soil
studio bader
© Benjamin Rieser. All rights reserved.
For native people all around the globe the earth is alive, and every wrinkle in the landscape, every hill and outcrop, each mountain and stream has a name and is instilled with ritual significance. The soil underneath the rainwater basin is not less sacred, but was caged, shut off from air, water, and light. The 20 cm of concrete represent the act of hostility, the crime that was committed when the basin was sealed. To unseal is not to give the soil life, to unseal is to give the soil back its agency, to reintegrate it into the community and the ecosystem that is floating university. The willow dome is a gift, an offering, an apology; it is meant to rotect, preserve, and grow with its purpose. A temple, a collaboration of human and non-human nature. A space for the humans of floating university to slow down, look, and spend time with the soil underneath, but also a space for the flora and fauna of floating to adopt and appropriate. A sacred place where human and nature are no longer two, but one.
The design studio becoming soil was, as the name suggests, all about soil, earth, land, ground. We were to find our own interest in the subject, be it cultural, socioeconomic, purely scientific or something else entirely and do research we could share with our fellow students. In the third part of the semester, the design phase, we were to translate the knowledge we aquired in the research and transpher phase and make a design of our choosing at floating university. Having engaged with the spiritual and religious aspects of soil and earth, prevelent mostly in nature worship of indigenous societies, we decided to bring a space of contemplation and spirituality to floating university and to give the soil, that is sealed underneath the concrete basin, a temple. Not only will the symbolic nature of this sacret space bring attention to our relationship to the community of microbes, plants, animals and funghi that is soil, but it opens the possibility for life to return to what is possibly just dead matter.
