Nearly a decade ago, the UN declared 2015 the ‘International Year of Soils’ and published their first report on soil health, which focused on the problem of soil degradation and how soil health is a key factor when it comes to climate change.¹ Some years later this degradation was described as follows by the editors of the book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet in the light of the geological time of the Earth: ‘Living arrangements that took millions of years to put into place are being undone in the blink of an eye.'² This quote points to how soil is not just a material for growing food, but earth is also a living arrangement, a sensorial material, and a foundation for life, that is threatened in a world affected and changed by multiple and co-evolving crises. Here, soil becomes a prism for discussions of regeneration.

The word regeneration is increasingly used by people who work with sustainability, ecology, and art. The term points to the fact that it is no longer enough just to try to keep things as they are. Instead, the human impact on the world’s ecosystems and the damage that has been done calls for a rebuilding and reparation of ecosystems. To regenerate — as it is described in one of the principles of regenerative agriculture — means to leave the soil in a better, more alive condition than it was in before, and the word also points to a reorientation towards matters of care, both when it comes to social relations and the economy.³

The increased focus on regeneration does also affect the crafts field, and is seen in the calls for alternatives to the big art institutions and museums that can bring art into public spaces in more inclusive, caring, diverse, and radical ways, fitting for the present. We see art projects questioning how time and space are constituted by the tradition of the white cube, artists who discuss the material conditions and possibilities for art making in a damaged world, and institutions that work with longer exhibition periods, community-engaging workshops, local materials, and care not just as a statement but as a practice within and across institution(s), and as something that extends to a more-than-human environment. Very slowly we begin to see art institutions — but mostly independent ones — work towards, as anthropologist Maria Puig de la Bellacasa puts it in her book Matters of Care, ‘… a vision that embeds care relations in mundane doings of maintenance and repair that sustain everyday life rather than on moral dispositions’,⁴ even though this work isn’t of course done overnight. Within these changes, the fruitful combination of art and craft play a crucial part in the way that it functions as a binder between art and life; showcasing traditional methods that challenge the idea of art making as something that transcends — that happens outside, above, or cut off from the everyday, material, and relational life.

In this text, I will concentrate on two different art and architecture projects both bringing forth a focus on soil through craft making in public spaces, but in different ways and contexts. One of the projects is the Danish contribution to the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2021, which went under the name Soil Lab. Here, architects, artists, ceramicists, soil experts, and the local community joined together to learn how to make bricks and ceramics out of rammed earth harvested directly from a local vacant lot at South Pulaski Road in Chicago, to discuss housing policy and housing possibilities in Chicago city, and to create local collaborations across skills and knowledges.

The other project is created by the nomadic and rhizomatic artist collective Futurefarmers (US/Belgium), which has facilitated and created artistic projects, community engagements, and performances in many parts of the world. They initiated the project Flatbread Society in Norway in 2012 as part of Losæter, a community farm in the highly commodified financial and cultural centre at the harbour in Oslo. Here, I will focus on Flatbread Society as a community of farmers, artists, bakers, soil experts, and oven builders who created The Bakehouse — ‘a sculpture and a gathering space that facilitates artistic production and exchange between various communities'⁵ built with inspiration and knowledge from old Norwegian architecture and crafts — and The Grain Field, cultivated with old ‘rescued seeds collected in the Northern Hemisphere’. I will look into how art making can take part in the creation of collective, public spaces to gather in and around and engage with, as partaking in conversations about the re-commoning of land. By looking into these two projects, I will speculate on how crafts in public spaces can introduce new modes of caring for soil, which can lead to ways of unknowing or “not-knowing” the land and vice versa. The unknowing is understood in the sense of unlearning soil and land tied to productionist thinking and universal histories of domination and extraction, and instead (re)learning how soil is telling specific stories about particular places.

“Empty” land
The Soil Lab project was initiated by the architects and designers behind the group called Soil Lab: Eibhlín Ní Chathasaigh, James Albert Martin, Anne Dorthe Vester, and Maria Bruun. The Soil Lab project evolved in Chicago during the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the COVID pandemic, in 2021, with a focus on community building in the outskirts of Chicago through the making of bricks and ceramics. The team created hands-on workshops and facilitated conversations around five main themes, ‘availability, community, soil health, material culture, and the architecture of public space’,⁶ with an ongoing focus on creating a space for the local community to join across differences and engage in ways they themselves wanted to.

A specific history of land use and land abandonment⁷ formed the topic for the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2021, ‘The Available City: How to transform vacant lots into “collective spaces”?’ Capitalism, the housing market, and segregation transformed the city of Chicago and has caused many empty lots in this area of the city, which lay the ground for the Soil Lab project. They wanted to suggest and experiment with new (old) ways of building with rammed earth on these vacant spaces. But the city of Chicago was not only haunted by⁸ availability. When the Soil Lab project was to begin, the initiators realised that the rammed earth they wanted to harvest directly from the ground at the vacant lot and use for the brick making contained toxic components, which made it unhealthy, and therefore impossible to work with the local soil. In the end, it was decided that the project should be moved to another vacant lot where the toxic ground was “contained” by a concrete foundation and a low wall of bricks. Here, “clean” earth from outside the city was brought in to the site to be worked with instead.

Building with rammed earth is an ancient method used for thousands of years. It is a method where bricks or walls are made out of a specific mix of raw materials from the ground. Its popularity has been growing because of the environmental and climatic challenges the world is facing and the growing demand for “cleaner” and more local materials in the building industry. The planetary climate changes call for other kinds of experts with skills that can accommodate the need for more sustainable solutions, and building with rammed earth is one example. To build with rammed earth not only requires the expertise of skilled architects, but also of ceramicists. The “empty” lot calls for a reimagination of the possibilities of the place, and here the artistic imagination and craft skills can bring something different to the table. It can bring attention to the details, the emotional and narrational aspect of the materials and the place. Many ceramicists pay attention to the story of the material and the importance of the sensorial. To learn more about how to work with rammed earth and clay, the initiators of Soil Lab reached out to ceramicist and expert in rammed earth constructions, Martin Rauch. In the Soil Lab publication, he talks about how working with unstable rammed earth with no cement or lime added is a recipe for experimenting and “unknowing” — or trying things out without knowing the result in advance. He states, ‘Rammed earth is not a standardized product: every product varies as much as the geology beneath it.'⁹

The poetics of a place is in the material
There is a poetic quality to craft made directly out of the soil from a specific place, but how can the poetics of a place take form, when we are no longer able to sense the place, in the meaning of not being able to grasp it with our bare hands, because it is too toxic? The fact is, that a place will tell its story no matter what, or to quote journalist Anjulie Rao’s review of the Soil Lab project in The Architectural Review: ‘[The parcels of land] are filled with difficult histories, unseen toxicity and the potential for thriving or further destruction. These materials — land, soil, remnants — speak whether or not we are listening.’ She points to the possibility for creative institutions to ask better questions about the histories of these materials: ‘What ideas might be produced if Soil Lab asked why the city would not let them disturb the earth as intended, instead of trucking in new soil? What new histories might be produced from former launderettes, local car garages or housing?'¹⁰

We might also ask: How does it fix the problem to contain the toxins under a surface of concrete? As Canadian philosopher Alexis Shotwell notes in her book Against Purity, there is no such thing as individual purity in the sense ‘that we can succeed in not being altered or shaped by the world’.¹¹ She points to the need for destigmatizing ways to talk about exposure to toxicity, as something that is shared but unevenly distributed. Even though the toxins — when it comes to North Lawndale — are buried under concrete, pollution knows no boundaries, but power, money, and the urge to control pollution create material and discursive boundaries. The new commons will have to deal with our unevenly shared exposure to chemical and toxic components, or more precisely: how the by-products of industrial capitalism affect real people’s lives in unexpected ways, difficult to calculate but often tied to the racialisation and colonisation of land and people. We can only hope that art and architecture projects like Soil Lab will start long-lasting conversations around the haunted landscapes we inhabit, and the importance of engaging members of the local community in these conversations through sensorial experience, which hopefully also lead to conversations about the value of the matter we call dirt, soil, earth.

In the meeting between art, craft, architecture, and design, our view on the relations between the natural world and our built surroundings can shift. Crafts can contribute to these meetings by facilitating open, but situated, definite spaces for difficult, necessary, and regenerative conversations between different people, and by building a ground for knowledge sharing across skills. Such meetings across skills in local communities may lead to discussions about how future liveability is connected to a neighbourhood’s past, but also its now. Craft making as a meeting point — as something to gather around — fills the “empty” spaces with new meanings, stories, and value.

Infrastructures of the commons
Futurefarmers describe themselves as ‘artists, designers, architects, anthropologists, writers, computer programmers and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyse moments of “not knowing”’.¹² A lot of their projects evolve around questions of infrastructures, the commons, and heritages. The long-term public art project Flatbread Society was initiated to take part in a negotiation of the use of land, the city, and the sea. The project is located as part of the community garden Losæter — a word combining two old Norwegian words for the commons, loallmenning and sæter, as described on the project’s website.¹³ Lo points to the geographical place near the water, and sæter describes a common area where animals are grazing in the summer. Integrated into the name of this place is then the idea of the commons, which indicates its importance to the project: to re-imagine the notion and meaning of the commons. The notion of the commons has a long global and complex history that differs geographically, but the disappearance of the commons is widespread and intrinsically connected to the expansion of the capitalist system in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and the privatisation of land and natural resources.¹⁴ In her book Re-enchanting the world. Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, feminist philosopher Silvia Federici defines the commons as ‘constituted on the basis of social corporation, relations of reciprocity, and responsibility for the reproduction of the shared wealth, natural or produced’.¹⁵ In other words, the commons are areas that are used, managed, and stewarded collectively, and where the group who uses it shares the responsibility for the area. Thus the ‘commons are not things but social relations’,¹⁶ as Federici states, because they tie people, humans, and non-humans, together in reciprocal relationships. The fight for the commons isn’t any less today, and one Scandinavian example could be the way the Sámi people must defend the land that they have stewarded for hundreds of years against (“green”) capitalism. Even though the Indigenous commons pose as crucial examples, it is important to remember, as Federici reminds us, that new forms of commons are constantly produced and reimagined.¹⁷ Flatbread Society is engaging in this reimagination of the commons by making the grain the prism of the project, as an integral part of Flatbread Society is The Grain Field. With The Grain Field, Flatbread Society collectively cultivates older, more robust seed varieties that will provide crops that are more resistant, as the seeds on the global market are extremely standardised due to market rules and privatisation. This standardisation makes the growers dependent on buying new seeds every year. Furthermore, a lot of old seed varieties are not cultivated but kept in seed banks, which makes food production vulnerable and threatens food security worldwide. Because seeds are alive, they need to be cultivated to stay resilient and adaptable to the changes in the climate and the specific ecosystem. Instead, we have a situation where a few big companies own most of the world’s cultivated seeds and foods.

Flatbread Society as a common is meant to be a gathering space for redistributing and sharing both knowledge and food across generations and times. In The Bakehouse, seeds are stored in vessels made of clay, inspired by traditional crafts, and this constitutes another kind of common — an alternative seed library for the future. Besides the seed library, the seeds are also harvested for collective bread making in The Bakehouse. The soil and the different seed varieties have been brought into Oslo from 50 different local farms which have provided their share to make the project a reality. This highlights another important aspect of the commons: as something made possible collectively, where a lot of small bits create the whole that unites the parts. The artistic dimension points to the same aspect that the Soil Lab project did — that places are often constituted by migration and the more-than-local, in the sense that they consist of a patchwork of materials, brought in from numerous places by numerous agents, carrying traces of past activities and negotiations of the value of land and soil, which expands the notion of the local. It is in this sense that Flatbread Society is all about the routes, movements, and infrastructures that constitute the commoning¹⁸ of a place.

To redefine what rescuing means
The shape of The Bakehouse is inspired by the reparation process of an old vessel, and points to the area where the sculpture is located — on the land near the ocean, at the old port of Oslo. At once a sculpture and a building, it invokes and facilitates resilience — to changing weather, changing climate, and changing food politics, while at the same time it invokes the history of food politics. The flatbreads baked in the ovens of The Bakehouse can themselves be seen as a part of the sculpture manifesting old technologies and what Flatbread Society calls ‘a storage economy’, as the flatbreads, when hung from the ceiling, can be stored for up to 20 years. Both the bread and the building are containers that store memories, heritage, life, and community. The vessel does not only point to the act of keeping, it is also a material metaphor for movement. It carries and holds stories of exploitations, exploration, expansion, and empire. When it comes to the history and politics of our food system it is not possible to flee from or forget these stories. When looking at Flatbread Society’s website, the words “reversing” and “rescue” seem to be key words for the project. With the notion of “reversed migration”, Flatbread Society points to how nationalist fantasies of the local must not take root. The Flatbread Society reinserts the idea of “rescue” as “return” into the vessel by retracing the routes and the infrastructure of the seeds in order to change the course that humanity — led by a very specific Western capitalist mindset — is heading towards. The return does not so much seem nostalgic as confronting. Returning, circulating, detouring, reversing is many-sided and complex, and it seems important to negotiate what needs to be reversed and conserved and what does not, and why. As part of the returning, Flatbread Society has initiated performances like Further on… to the land (2018), a five-day walk/performance all about returning the cultivated grains from The Grain Field to the farm, which provided the ancient seeds for the field five years earlier. Two other projects centred around returning, initiated by Flatbread Society, are The Seed Mast (2015) and The Seed Journey (2017). The Seed Mast is a traditional constructed boat mast made for storing grains while travelling the sea, the first step towards enabling The Seed Journey. The Seed Journey took place as a sea voyage from Norway to Kurdistan in an old “rescued” sailboat, where the crew collected seeds from various farmers, bakers, and seed savers along the way in order to return the seeds to their geographic origin in the Middle East, as a “reversed migration”. The initiators themselves called it ‘a “reverse Nansen”, “reverse Humboldt”, reverse “Darwin”, Cook, Magellan or whatever traveller you may want to choose’,¹⁹ pointing to the need to engage critically with the histories of Western sciences, technology, and the domination over and capitalisation of nature and people.

I think the notion of “rescue” can be dangerous in as such as it bears connotations of an idea that some humans or parts of the natural world are in a position where they need to be “saved” — a position of inferiority possibly forced or created in the first place — which then reproduces a constellation of debt between the “superior” and “inferior”. Rescue, to my ears, also brings connotations of quick fixes and easy manoeuvres, but it will unavoidably have to implicate a long stretch where new (old) technologies and craft that pay attention to the more-than-human world play a crucial role. But it also becomes evident that Flatbread Society rather wants to tell the story, not of human domination, but of human domestication, of plants. Domestication is not about ownership, but neither does it ignore the relations of power among, and dependence across, species. Domestication is not a one-way influence, but a reciprocal one, as researchers have pointed out that plants also domesticate people.²⁰ Flatbread Society seems to want to tell the story about the role that crafts and open-source approaches plays in this reciprocal co-constitution of plants and people.

Final thoughts
I think that projects like Soil Lab and Flatbread Society — that implicate conversations on community building — lay the ground for an understanding of the notion of rescuing as “unknowing” or “unlearning” techniques that deplete communities and land through paying closer attention to the remembering, regenerating, and restoring (and re-storying) of relations based on interdependence. By paying attention to the histories of these particular places and their specific ways of building, farming, and living, through working with and sensing materials such as topsoil, or clay, or rammed earth, it seems to me that these projects encourage new ways of looking at soil and care, and what it means to care for Earth. Care as something expanded, relational, and social, as Federici would have put it, something more-than-human, and as something that with every new encounter negotiates its own meaning.²¹ These projects remind us that the local is not just local in a nationalist, clean, pure, or fixed sense. Both when it comes to Soil Lab — a Danish team at an international architecture biennial in Chicago, a former prairie, bringing clean earth into polluted areas, and when it comes to Flatbread Society — an international team bringing fertile soil from Norway’s countryside into the city of Oslo, tracing the routes and histories of the seeds through time. The local is rather a patchwork of migrating elements and knowledges that, combined together, collectively form this uneven and unpredictable locality, and its ground, the basis. Moreover, these projects invite us to rethink and discuss, hopefully more collectively, what kinds of life and lifeforms, human and more-than-human, should be cared for and made possible within the different locals, and what kinds of possible just relations and infrastructures could unfold between these different localities.