Repairing the Soil: Technical, Sensitive, And Political Remediation

This article shows how contemporary artworks “repair” soils by combining technical, emotional, and political remediation within a context where international frameworks and cultural policies acknowledge the importance of both soil protection and artists’ roles in raising awareness of ecological issues. As part of the Soilscape project, we have compiled an inventory of 98 artistic soil-related initiatives and used field data (interviews, observations, and archives) to analyze the processes, gestures, and devices of three specific works. These three cases— Négociation 161 , Dear Ground (Caroline Le Méhauté); Pollusol (duet (n)); and Notre troisième peau (Mycélium company)—create soil publics through indexing, attachments, and sensitive activations. They are situated, non-scalable works that deploy an inter-species diplomacy where temporality is crucial to the ecology of attention. In conclusion, these works can be understood as extended conservation devices that combine understanding and action, shifting from “making understand” to “making happen.”

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