From the complexities of fungi networks to the colourful gardens of stately homes, SOIL: The World at Our Feet at Somerset House, reflects on the cultural, ecological, and spiritual significance of soil, offering a multi-sensory exploration of its vital role in sustaining life.
“‘Look up’ we are often told […] But what if instead of looking up, we looked down?” This is the invitation to visitors upon entry to SOIL: The World at Our Feet, at London’s iconic Somerset House. Co-curated by Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy of The Land Gardeners, along with May Rosenthal Sloan and Claire Catterall, the exhibition invites us to rethink our relationship with – and our very understanding of – soil, positioning it as the essential foundation of life on Earth.
Appropriately set on the lower ground floor of the building, the exhibition requires visitors to descend multiple flights of stairs if entering via the institution’s grand courtyard, giving a sense of venturing down into the foundation in question. The multidisciplinary show – which engages artists, scientists, filmmakers, thinkers and activists to uncover the hidden mysteries of soil – develops over three thematic sections: Life Below Ground, Life Above Ground, and Hope.
Outside the exhibition proper – free to view in the public space of Somerset House – Vivien Sansour and Neville Wisdom’s Ahl el Thara, People of the Soil (2024) provides the groundwork for the exhibition by underscoring the cultural and spiritual connections that link communities to the earth. Their short film chronicles the lives of Palestinians engaged in the preservation of heirloom seeds through the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library’s Seed Protectors Project. By documenting the dedication of these “people of the soil”, Sansour and Wisdom offer a poignant commentary on the deep, almost sacred, relationship people have with the land, especially in regions where access to soil and agriculture is politically charged.
The first of SOIL’s thematic sections – Life Below Ground – undertakes the seemingly straightforward yet significant task of impressing upon visitors the profound complexity of soil, revealing that it is far more than mere dirt. France Bourély (ARISTA Sensory bristle on insect head, 2022) who describes herself as a “contemplative biologist”, captivates (and unsettles the entomophobic among us) with photographic close-ups of soil-dwelling creatures, such as dung beetles and ants, uncovering what she calls “invisible territories” and the “personalities” within them. Wim van Egmond’s Mating and egg laying earthworms (2021) draws the audience into the world of soil microbes, revealing its unseen dynamism via time-lapse microphotography in collaboration with musician Michael Prime, whose soundscape One House as Peyote (2005/2020) makes us privy to an interaction that usually goes unheard by human ears: the extraction and exchange of water and nutrients between a peyote cactus and the soil in which it is rooted, as well as other resident organisms.
Among these are fungi, which take centre stage in perhaps the most awe-inspiring work of the exhibition, Marshmallow Laser Feast’s Fly Agaric I – Poetics of Soil (2024). This immersive video work delves into the enigmatic networks of fungi and mycelium, showcasing the crucial role fungi play in breaking down and recycling organic matter to nourish the soil. The glowing, pulsating fungal networks resemble a vibrant underground highway, channelling life into mushrooms that release spores, subtly affecting the planet’s weather patterns. The visuals are accompanied by Merlin Sheldrake’s lyrical commentary, which explores the profound symbiotic relationship between life and soil.
These explorations of the complex interconnections that sustain life on Earth set the stage for SOIL’s Life Above Ground section, which highlights the profound relationship between soil and humanity. Ken Griffiths’s The Sweetmans – A Country Cottage Calendar (1974) is a series of 12 photographs of an elderly couple, taken once a month over the course of a year in their blooming and withering garden, evoking the love and labour poured into the soil – and the gifts it gives in return. Howard Sooley’s film (2024) about the gardens of Great Dixter, a renowned historic house in southern England, offers a kind of parallel, moving through the changing seasons and reflecting the care taken by the gardeners and the exquisite beauty and biodiversity born of attentiveness to the soil.
Soil holds more than the potential promise of pretty flowers, however. History, itself, is embedded within it. In Trilogies: Monastiraki Athens (2018), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige present photographs, drawings and handwritten notes based on drilling core samples from Athens (with the wider Unconformities project also taking in Beirut and Paris). These works, developed in collaboration with historians, archaeologists and scientific illustrators, chart the narratives ingrained in the land. “Fragments of the great wall destroyed during the Persian invasion” and “probably used to build a public bath in the Hellenistic era” are just two such narratives ascribed to the Monastiraki samples.
“What strikes us when we look at the core samplings, with the stones and earth sedimentations that served as the basis for the Trilogies project, is how each civilisation replaces the previous one and seeks to wipe out what existed before in order to stamp its new power,” the artists tell Canvas. “Through drawing, photography and description, three different forms of representation, the trilogies show what lies beneath our feet.” The earth bears witness to and carries the scars of both the natural and human forces that shape history – what the artists describe as a “palimpsest of epochs”. A particularly poignant moment in the exhibition also comes through the work of Annalee Davis, whose Unlearn the Plantation (2022–23) meditates on the scars left by colonial violence on both the land and its people. Drawing from her personal connection to a former sugar plantation in Barbados, Davis’s art encourages a reflection on the painful history embedded in soil, as well as on the possibilities for healing and reconciliation.
The exhibition additionally draws connections between soil health and pertinent global issues such as agricultural practice and heritage preservation. Most strikingly, Asunción Molinos Gordo’s Ghost Agriculture (2018) creates traditional Egyptian khayamiya patchworks based on agricultural land use in the Nile Valley. The work presents a complex interplay of power and scale, with Egyptian agriculture revealed to be shaped by what she calls a “disjointed set of interests and desires that put at stake the common good”. Using film from the 1930s and 40s shot by Scottish missionaries in Palestine, Theo Panagopoulos’s The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (2024) confronts the delicate intersection of culture, history and land through the imagery of flowers. Re-editing the footage into a quiet reflective essay, Panagopoulos explores the relationship between the Palestinian people and their land, as well as the complexities of image-making, examining its power as both a tool for testimony and a form of violence in the context of the intricate relationship between people and land. It is a meditative piece that questions how soil, both literal and symbolic, becomes a site of memory, resistance and erasure.
Other works, including Fatima Alaiwat’s Smellscape: Rhythms with Bokashi (2022), not only represent the connection between humanity and the soil but also actively seek to foster this connection in themselves. Alaiwat’s captivating “map” or “smell score”, as she calls it, brings an embodied sensory experience to the art of composting, inviting visitors to engage with the smell of organic matter through the technique of bokashi fermentation – a process that transforms food waste into nutrient-rich compost. Alaiwat’s work is a multisensory journey that may alter our experience and perception of soil, a shift that she believes will improve the way in which soil is cared for and, therefore, the quality and health of the soil itself which, in turn, nourishes our bodies.
SOIL ends on a cautiously optimistic note. An immersive global database of stories highlights the diverse efforts underway to protect and regenerate the soil, with farmers apparently standing at the forefront as custodians of the land in the UK. Something & Son have created a kitchen in the exhibition to demonstrate how nature creates soil, and have provided “recipes to save the soil”, among them “No dig gardening” and “Water buffalo”. A large wall space is covered with pieces of paper, on which visitors write their “Recipe to save earth” (not capitalised, though it has clearly been interpreted in multiple ways). Among the suggestions is “Compost the rich” – a new addition to Alaiwat’s Smellscape, perhaps?
