The soil reveals an alternative cosmology: a constant doing and undoing, a decomposing and re-seeding, a strange network of past and future. And for us humans, soil is a space of grief, of memory, as well as futurity. Soil is agent, powerful, political: it is always moving, crumbling, sliding, sinking, collapsing, re-making worlds. I want to reimagine soil and the stratification of the earth’s and my own body - to align myself again with the resistant potential of soil. The soil, like a reversed skin, reveals what happens directly under its surface.
In the ecological crisis we find ourselves in, we need to become earthly/terrestrial again - rooting ourselves in the ecosystems. In the performance (WASTE)LAND, I bury my body in the ground up to the neck to re-imagine soil by becoming a part of it - a deep connection forged through previously unknown proximity. The performing body becomes an offering to the soil, an invitation to the many microbes to sequester the carbon we are made of, an attempt at relating deeply with what sustains life itself. (WASTE)LAND is an encounter between the soil and my own body in a state of co-transformation.

(WASTE)LAND I - LÜTZERATH, 07.01.2023

On the edge of the lignite mine Garzweiler II, where the landscape drops, the spatiotemporal entanglements of Earth are rendered painfully visible, falling down along the strata. In the village of Lützerath, located right on the edge of the mine, its many human and more-than-human inhabitants are threatened by the expansion of the mine and the extraction of the lignite below its ground. But the ground bears more secrets: the topsoil is so-called “Löss” - an incredibly fertile, healthy soil to grow food on. Many meters below this rich underground, the lignite has been found: fossilized forests from millions of years ago. In order to reach the lignite, all strata is overturned, disrupted, gutted from the earth. The relation between humans and soil is deeply disturbed in this exploited landscape, filled with the ghosts of villages that have disappeared in the mine.

Thinking with: Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care
Vegetation under Power, Bauhaus Verlag
Photosynthetic Mattering, Natasha Myers
Still Burning, Coal, Capital, Colonialism
Re-animating soil, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa
Sara Ahmed, Living a feminist life
https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/an-earth-being-platform
A billion black anthropocenes or none, Kathryn Yussof
https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/?cd=true&rr=true&cdex=true&text=terra-forma-mapping-ruined-soils&ttype=essay
Bruno Latour, Down to Earth
M Archive: After the end of the world, Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I would like to begin with landing, with arriving. Maybe you can focus on your feet touching the ground. I am touching the ground, too - or it is touching me. It is the 7th of January, a Saturday, 2023, in Lützerath, the west of Germany. I am buried in the soil, neck-deep. More specifically, I am buried in a specific type of soil called “Löss”. “Löss” is one of the most fertile, plant-friendly soil types in the world, and it covers the area that is called “Rheinland”. Fertile soils are something very rare. They are also something fundamental to all terrestrial life. There is about 1percent of all fertile soils left, and they are under threat. Like here. Scientists are only beginning to understand soil as an incredibly complex ecosystem, a foodweb of around 10 billion beings per tablespoon.
Soil can save us, they said, the scientists playing with mud. They said that soil can hold carbon, and that all the carbon floating around in the air, choking the planet, can become soil again. And the soil can become food for the breathing beings on it. Today, I have added myself - my body - to this ecosystem.

Leaves. Pieces of wood. A piece of paper. Dead plants. Seeds, waiting for the spring. The ghost of a tree that was here once. Many ghosts of many trees that occupied the same soil space as my body now. Hibernating animals, curled up in their holes, the soil like a heavy blanket.
Like the hibernating animals, the mice, the field hamsters, the larvae of earth wasps, the heavy soil makes me sleepy.

I imagine myself falling asleep under the weight of the soil.

In a few weeks, with the rainfalls of spring, I would feel the water dripping down my face and slowly dissipating around me, the wetness seeping into my surrounding. The splashing drops would cover my face, thickly crusted in mud. If you’d pass by, you would not notice my head, as the wind has swept leaves over my hair.
I would smell the earth intense gradient of decaying matter and amongst it, I would see the bright green blades of grass pushing through. My body weight would be pulled downwards by the earths gentle gravitational pull, steadily sinking. The heaviness of my body would push me down into the soil.

In a year, a new generation of leaves and other organic matter will have dropped around me, creating yet another strata of soil. My mouth might already be underground. I could not speak anymore. My voice would be deafened by the earth on my tongue and between my teeth. I would taste the decaying matter, a metallic taste in my mouth.

Within these months, the upright position and the weight distribution will have squeezed all the liquid that lubricates my joints: my spinal disks will be dry and crumbling, as my bones would grind on each other, crunching like the earth between my teeth.

Within another year, my nose would be underground, too. My mouth is closed shut, and my neck is not longer in the first, aerated layer of topsoil, but submerged in solidity. With my nose in the earth, the smell of soil is loud. After rainfall, the smell is like a sinfonie. I have never felt scent so intensely. Other animals, tiny creatures, release pheromones and other scent molecules, and I am beginning to learn how to smell them, talking to each other. My eyes are just above ground, and my lower eyelashes already dip into the network of fungi, invisibly entangled with the networks underground. Translucent strings of hyphae grow on the periphery of my sight. I have not seen the sky in a long time, but I am captivated by all the life I see so close by, as the worms caress my face, as the microbes snuggle up in the dents of my skin: we are so intimate by now.

As soon as my ears would be submerged in the soil, I think I would hear a grinding.
A mechanical, violent sound, crunching the earth like I do between my teeth,
but with much bigger teeth, teeth of steel. The critters and microbes feel it, they hush nervously, issue olfactory signals of warning.
The metallic taste would begin to turn bitter, toxic: pieces of plastic between my teeth and the rumbling sound of machines: crushing my weight, compressing me, turning me into something unrecognizable.

I will still be human, somehow, not quite hummus. But almost. My body is a part of the soil: in the organisms shifting, moving, crumbling, sliding, sinking, collapsing around me.
The earth is not longer stable. Maybe it never was
There is no territory to conquer, there is no map to pin our location into.
There is soil - not dirt - soil: now an agent, active, making decisions, making history, reorienting ints magnetic field into a political compass: a collection of ruins and fossils, haunted by its ghosts. throwing up remnants of our collective ancestry to the light: the soil as the collective and material subconscious, but alive, so alive!?

I do not want this too look like I buried myself.
This is not a sacrifice, not an act of suicide, no burial.
This is an offering: I am offering myself back to the earth and I wonder if she will take my body. The earth is no greedy god, not a revengeful one. The earth is under attack, and it is hungry, and it wants to eat what has been ripped from its guts. Most of all, they want carbon: and this is what my body is offering. First, I tried to do the work of plants: to photosynthesize, to miraculously catch the carbon that is suffocating us from the atmosphere, fixing it in my roots, burying it in the soil. I wish my skin was green: but it is not. So I have decided to put myself into the soil. Being eaten by you, being swallowed, being submerged, being drowned in your water, being you, becoming you, becoming me.

I was remembering that our bodies don’t end at the skin.
the nibbling of the earth worms, nematodes, critters, already dissolving me - All the edges are dissolving.
I am the submerged who is held, is holding, is holding the crumbling earth on my shoulders now.
The soil holds our grief,
it holds my anxious, grieving body.
The nervous breakdown of matter,
making and unmaking the world all the time,
making my body, your body from soil
shaped from clay:
rocks become teeth,
moss becomes sweat,
our bodies are earthly, dirty,
mud creatures.

Here, memories are skin, not stone.
I want to store all memories in my hands: clenching my fingers into fists - I want to trust my muscle memory. Into the underland I place my archive of wreckage, all I know, what I love and fear, underground.

I can no longer feel my feet: they are getting numb. I can’t exactly tell how deep I am reaching down. You can’t see it either. I might be taller than I am. Drilling into the soil, not 1, 60, but two meters, maybe three three. Continuing downward three meters, we follow the tunnels of badgers and the burrows of small mammals. Four. Maybe five.

Skinsoil is porous: it transforms and shapeshifts, it tilts and wrinkles and stretches and gets dents and becomes a landscape with scars and valleys and ridges. All that concerns us is this skin of the earth, the biofilm, the epidermis, then the dermis, under the skin, flaking off, peeling back:

Deeper down: my tissues. Muscles, Fascia, …
Lubricated by the water running through my body,
not distilled water - thick, rich water, slimy waters, thick like blood and snot,
filling up the voids in my joints, the sponges in my spine, making me liquid.
Dripping through my tissues and dispersing throughout the mushy body.
My muscles, fleshy tissue, tense, vibrating, made up by fibers,
like rootes stretching through the soil. The roots of the veins, stretching out, pumping carbon and sugars or oxygen and immune responses, the thin branches of the nervous system, linking together the parts, warning of the cold, the disturbance, sharing what we have so it can become more for others. connecting through this network underskin.

The soft pink tissue enveloping my bones. Then the bones, liquid bathed, resting safely among the rich tissues, giving structure. My curved spine is drilling down. We hit stones digging so deep, the subsoil ends and we enter the mineral realm. Calcium. Granit.

The pressure on my body makes it shatter, slowly crushes my bones into stone powder, exposing the rifts and fault lines on the continental drifts.
The furthest humans have ever drilled into the soil are only six kilometers. How high is the highest mountain you have climbed?

Down here, the pressure is already enormous. The memory is building itself around me: remembering downwards.

Seen from here, I can tell you.
THE GROUND IS NOT FLAT
THE EARTH IS NOT DEAD
A geology of grief and grassroots, rocks and resistance.
the violent division of beings in aboveground and below,
the dead being buried and being buried and being buried
a belief that all this is dead, from the neck down, somehow for someone to take, to gauge from my ribs, your ribs, their ribs forming the modern human, the homos oeconomicus, the anthropos, the destroyer of worlds, some man to devour it all to rub their bodies with oil so their muscles can glisten in the scorching, relentlessly exploding sun, white bodies like my body, sustained by atrocity, lubricated by fossil fuels, whiteness as ownership of the earth for ever and ever.

I need to get used to this pressure. I need to become resilient: being able to hold the weight, so that the pressure can be gradually increased.
Resilience: It is a way of being trained to take more pressure, a way of coercion, governance, oppression.
It is Getting pushed into the ground. Our bodies Kicked down, held back, fallen, killed, buried, cut open: you find layers.
What they don’t know is the exertion of pressure makes resilience. The oppressed, under pressure, grow resilient.

The earthworms will have eaten my up in a wonderful feast before you get to me
I will wait here longer. A very very long time

I am growing resilient. I am taking the pressure. The pressure is slowly working into the tissues of my shoulders, calves, knees, compressing my muscles, bringing them closer to each other. Their shaking can not shake them loose as the earth pulls me closer in. Some people feel safe in conditions of pressure being exerted on the body, like being hugged very tightly. I try to imagine being hugged by the ground, too.

It is not easy to be resilient when you feel from below and see from above, broken in the middle.

I want to plant myself like a question: where am I? What could bloom here, rooting in grief and resilience: raging grass, crying roots, screaming trees. Who is decomposing whom? eating whom up, nourishing whom, pressuring whom, who is burying whom and in which soil, and who will feed on the body, and to whom do we feed our bodies?

Being close to the ground, being on the ground, being in the ground, has never been a sign of weakness. It is from here that we grow upwards. From this perspective, everything - everyone - is an uprising.

I will be waiting for the pressure to heat up my body. So much pressure that I need to become as hard as a rock to resist. I am sediment, I will be fossil, I will have been a soft body, turning into soft rock.
This will take a lot of time to wait. Around two to five million years.
You will not be around to see it. You would not recognize me: the contours of my body, my open hands, my thighs, my jaw, will be immersed in the stone. I will have turned the color of rich soil, dark brown and red. I will have become lignite. Another hundred million years later, another hundred million years of pressure and heat, I will have lost all my humanness and become hard coal, black and dark and stone, a fossil dragon: my breath not longer solid, but burning, like coal: Breathing and burning. I want to go as close to the core of the earth as necessary. On this scale of the organism, I sense the bacteria swimming across the oceans of my eyes, the tiny cities in my belly, the whole surface of my skin populated, reproducing, evolving. This is the last step: To understand myself as a planet.

Can you imagine this?

Speaking is getting hard now.
I want you to imagine something else.
You can come here, and I will whisper it to you.

THIS COULD BE A FOREST