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Summary
In collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, we present a choral, poetic collage featuring the voices of The Understory of the Understory: a virtual symposium bringing together practitioners from many disciplines to consider the ground beneath our feet across ecologies, politics and spiritualities. With vignettes ranging from co-evolution to condensation, from medicine to mycomorphism, and from death to dust and back again, and all generally rooted in a question of earth, soil, and territory.
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Hungry for more? Enjoy each contribution to The Understory of the Understory in full. Click here for the official programme.
YouTube Playlists
Show Notes
This episode features the voices of Andrew Adamatzky, Sean Cho A., Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Lynne Boddy, Marisol de la Cadena, James Fairhead, Adham Faramawy, Elaine Gan, Kathleen Harrison, Tim Ingold, Ayesha Tan Jones, Asim Khan, Simone Kotva, Daisy Lafarge, Yasmeen Lari, Cecilia Lewis, Thandi Loewenson, Alex McBratney, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Angelica Patterson, Lucia Pietroiusi, Elizabeth Povinelli, Maria Puig de la Bellacassa, Filipa Ramos, Asad Raza, Merlin Sheldrake, Oula Valkeapää, Sumayya Vally, Long Litt Woon, and Jay G Ying.
Music in this episode by Cat Can Do, Scott Gailey, Hotspring, Yu Su, Barren House, Kanahuaxtli, You’re Me, Hidden Sky, Greenplant, YaYa Bones, and Sunfish Moon Light.
This episode was produced by Future Ecologies, in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries.
Hosts Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski
Editing and mixing by Mendel Skulski.
Special thanks to Kostas Stasinopoulos, Holly Shuttleworth, Suzanne Husky, and the General Ecology project at the Serpentine Galleries.
General Ecology is a long-term, cross-organisational, multi-disciplinary and cross-media research project. Harnessing the network and learnings developed over the last years, the project is the Serpentine’s think tank at the porous thresholds of art, science and the humanities, bringing together the most forward-thinking researchers, artists, activists and practitioners from all disciplines to reflect on the urgent crises of the Anthropocene by thinking ecologically both within the Galleries, across a network of individuals and organisations, and in a wider context.
The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is curated by Lucia Pietroiusti (Curator, General Ecology, Serpentine Galleries) Filipa Ramos, writer, animal whisperer with Kostas Stasinopoulos (Assistant Curator, Live Programmes, Serpentine Galleries). Produced by Holly Shuttleworth (Producer, Serpentine Galleries) and Visual Identity by Giles Round.
Citations
People mentioned in this episode include: Karrabing Film Collective, Achille Mbembe, Natasha Myers, Edward Makuka Nkoloso, M NourbeSe Philip, Namwali Serpell, and Eyal Weizman. See also: Jane Bennett, Michael Marder, Daniel Münster, and Levi Van Sant.
This episode includes audio recorded by dobroide, reinsamba, jorickhoofd, Hitrison, phenoxy, yks, mc2method. davidbain, kangaroovindaloo (2) , 14GPanskaMuzatko_Matej, and UnplugTheFridge, protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, and accessed through the Freesound Project.
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and iNaturalist.
If you like what we do, and you want to help keep it ad-free, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Pay-what-you-can (as little as $1/month) to get access to bonus monthly mini-episodes, stickers, patches, a community Discord chat server, and more. This season, we’re taking a tour of some of our Seaweed Sojourners, with the help of Josie Iselin.
Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:02
You're listening to season three of Future Ecologies.
Ayesha Tan Jones 00:09
Here's me and my friend called the tree. Actually, we’re like really old friends. We're like cousins, we share a lot of the same DNA. Some reason we just grew in very, very different ways.
[Music: Life in the Understory – Sunfish Moon Light]
Simone Kotva 00:26
A gardener who cares for a tree may be said to give it attention, but their solicitations are as nothing to the attentiveness of the tree, which each day waits patiently for the sun to appear, and surrenders itself wholly to the elements.
Asim Khan 00:45
Even the rocks will speak of this brief history. I, the nervous breakdown of minerals. I, who was addicted to my own hypocrisy.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 00:56
Soil is a testimony that everything on earth is matter, made of matter, that has been matter of something else. As we die, we return to the soil, we are matter passing, shape-shifting forms through a finite Earth. Soil embodies the biogeochemical processes that make life on Earth as we know it. The ground that we walk upon is a living multispecies world, literally teeming with creatures.
Tim Ingold 01:28
What has happened with industrialization is perhaps more the illusion rather than the reality that the earth is hard surfaced. But modernity and the industry that sustains it has conspired to create this illusion that we live our lives on a kind of platform that is layered over the earth – as our crust. Here's the earth beneath, and we're on top, and the ground appears as an interface between the two.
Alex McBratney 02:01
Da Vinci said 500 years ago, that we know more about the planets than we do about the soil beneath their feet. Unfortunately, that might still be true.
Elaine Gan 02:13
In other words –
Hans Ulrich Obrist 02:15
What on earth is ground?
[Music swells]
Mendel Skulski 02:20
Welcome to a very special episode of Future Ecologies, presented in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries. My name is Mendel.
Adam Huggins 02:31
And my name is Adam.
Mendel Skulski 02:32
And these are the voices of The Understory of the Understory: a collection of artworks, presentations, and conversations – curated as part of the General Ecology project at the Serpentine Galleries. This is the fourth edition of an annual celebration of multispecies consciousness: The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish.
Adam Huggins 02:55
The Understory of the Understory is everything that you might miss from a bird's eye view, the unseen and the underappreciated. It includes more than 30 reflections on topics ranging from the vast to the microscopic, but all generally rooted in the question of Earth, soil, and territory.
Mendel Skulski 03:16
You can experience the two-day symposium in its entirety, or any of these contributions individually, on the Serpentine Galleries' YouTube channel. You can find the link in the show notes of this episode.
Adam Huggins 03:29
But since you're here, we've sifted through the components of the understory, broken them down and digested them into this audio compost.
Mendel Skulski 03:39
Naturally, there is no single through line or narrative. Instead, you can expect a blend of granular themes. We've ruminated on these layers of raw material,
Adam Huggins 03:52
Added some sonic amendments,
Mendel Skulski 03:54
And now present to you this reconstituted,
Adam Huggins 03:57
Highly concentrated
Mendel Skulski 03:59
if loosely aggregated, media.
Adam Huggins 04:02
We're proud to serve as the decomposers of this symphony of voices.
Mendel Skulski 04:08
Its movements ranged from coevolution to condensation,
Adam Huggins 04:12
from terraforming to termitomyces,
Mendel Skulski 04:16
and from death to dust and back again.
Adam Huggins 04:25
Okay, let's dig in.
[Music: Signs from Cirrus – Cat Can Do]
Long Litt Woon 04:34
Grief grinds slowly. It devours all the time it needs. The course of bereavement does not run smooth. It progresses in fits and starts, takes unforeseeable turns. If anyone had told me that mushrooms would be my lifeline, I would have rolled my eyes. What do mushrooms have to do with mourning?
Lynne Boddy 05:04
This is the realm of Kingdom Fungi. Without death, there could be no life.
Asim Khan 05:10
At some point, these words will dissolve.
Merlin Sheldrake 05:14
My father proposed an experiment: we cut the top off the clear plastic bottle. Into the bottle we placed alternating layers of soil, sand, dead leaves, and finally, a handful of earthworms. Over the next days, I watched the worms wind their way between the layers. They mixed and stirred, nothing stayed still. Sand crept into soil and leaves crept into sand. The hard edges of the layers dissolved into each other. The worms might be visible, my father explained. But there are many more creatures that behave like this that you can't see: tiny worms, and creatures smaller than tiny worms, and creatures still smaller that don't look like worms, but they're able to mix and stir and dissolve one thing into another just like these worms can. Composers make pieces of music. These were decomposers, who unmake pieces of life. Nothing could happen without them.
Lynne Boddy 06:11
Their beauty and vitality are stark contrast to the dead tissues on which they feed.
Merlin Sheldrake 06:17
They're eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel and behave. Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over 90% of their species remain undocumented. The more we learn about Fungi, the less makes sense without them.
Time Ingold 06:51
Fungi don't behave as organisms are supposed to behave. They spill out, they create relationships. They're all over the place.
Lynne Boddy 06:59
There are several million species of fungi, and not surprisingly, an equally vast diversity of sizes, shapes, colors and forms. With flowering plants we know they don't just have flowers, they have the leaves and the roots and the shoots. And fungi have equivalent parts too. That's called the mycelium.
Andrew Adamatzky 07:19
Mushrooms are really
Lynne Boddy 07:21
the fruit bodies of the fungi. They're equivalent to the flowers or the fruits of flowering plants. The fruit bodies produce the spores, which are like the seeds of flowering plants. When a spore lands, if the conditions are right, a fine filament grows, and the fine filament is called a hypha. These hyphae grow from their tips. It branches, higgledy piggledy to start with. This is the main body of the fungus. These individual hyphae form a network called the mycelium. At the edges of this network, the hyphae are evenly spaced, searching optimally and efficiently for nutrients. They are microscopic but together en mass, we can see them
Merlin Sheldrake 08:11
Fungi are peculiar in a number of ways. But one of their peculiarities is that they have these distributed bodies and indeterminate patterns of growth. And so there's no specific place where they could be integrating what they perceive. They seem to be able to coordinate their bodies both a little bit everywhere at once, and also nowhere in particular.
Andrew Adamatzky 08:39
Mushrooms form important part of ecosystem. They act like messengers between trees, insects, plants, and all other parts of the forest for example, and they understand language of trees, understand language of plants, and then somehow managed to translate between the species. Therefore most likely language of mushrooms will be very, very complicated.
[Music: Wordless Sentence – Scott Gailey]
Lynne Boddy 09:00
Fungi feed by a process that is called 'external digestion': the hyphae secrete enzymes that break down big bits of food into small molecules – molecules that are small enough to be absorbed by those individual hyphal filaments.
Daisy Lafarge 09:18
We lose our heads but not our appetites. In love we eat each other up. Part of love's vocabulary is gustatorial. It consumes and devours, it swallows, or else desires to be swallowed up.
Oula Valkeapää 09:38
<In Finnish> When do I exist? Break for food.
Jay G. Ying 09:47
Where the broad shouldered moon, stoic, was whole again as your image un breaks upon the water.
Ayesha Tan Jones 10:00
Imagine all the tension, tightness, any of the pain, just decomposing into the wood. Getting transmuted and transformed into nutrient rich soil. Compost your pain.
Long Litt Woon 10:35
No wonder people talk about a vacuum after someone dies. There are so many hours in the day that have to be filled when someone very close to us passes away. For me, these forays into the fungi Kingdom became a way of spending this unwanted spare time. And as I became more familiar with certain forests, I also ventured to go out hunting on my own, with only my mushroom basket and newly acquired knowledge for company. Listing my favorite spots was rather like coming home, I knew exactly where to go
Merlin Sheldrake 11:18
Fungi are everywhere, but they're easy to miss. They're inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on.
Long Litt Woon 11:26
Since I became bitten by the mushroom bug, I have discovered an invisible parallel world right at my feet. A magical world, which I would have once walked straight past unwitting,
Merlin Sheldrake 11:43
As you hear these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they've done for more than a billion years.
Long Litt Woon 11:50
Sometimes when I find mushrooms, time seems to stand still: I experience both flow and Zen. Gathering mushrooms is both a tactile and sensory experience. My heart lept the first time I found a delicious edible mushroom on my own. Find one mushroom, and there's a good chance that you will find another nearby. The thrill of discovery is cumulative. One mushroom, one delight. Two mushrooms, double delight.
Daisy Lafarge 12:39
We eat each other, but in such a way that the meal is inexhaustible.
Lucia Pietroiusti 12:47
There's something about this like being the end of the line or being a part of a circle. We always think of humans as a species that's not going to change. But obviously we're as in the middle of a process of co-evolution, evolution, transformation. And we tend to think of the end of the contemporary time as always a kind of End of History moment, we tend to think of lines, with us at a kind of end point, as opposed to inserting oneself or being like a temporary part of something that is more of a cycle. So I wonder if it's not so much that either it's good life renewal or it's bad decay. You're sort of in the middle all the time.
Elaine Gan 13:25
In a recent talk, philosopher Achille Mbembe noted that the key question that colonization raises is 'who owns the earth'? For whom and to whom does the earth belongs? The key project of decolonization for Mbembe is to respond to that question with a resounding cry that the earth belongs to all of us. The earth is what we all hold and possess in common. We all define how the earth becomes livable. This is a powerful way of articulating decolonization. And I want to build on it by turning the statement by insisting that we, we in our various configurations and compositions, belong to the earth. It is practices of belonging that define livability. So we are of this earth, perhaps one of its many lively qualities, rather than one of its managers or owners. We simultaneously and differentially, are possessed by. cultivated and composed by the various, the multiple, the under-storied more than human workings of the Earth.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 14:45
Soil generation, or pedogenesis, is a procedural concept most intimately related to the breakdown of matter through weathering and action of microorganisms. In this sense, the dynamic liveliness of soil geological, biological and chemical processes features breakdown as an essentially collective form of agency.
[Soundscape: Cows grazing]
Marisol de la Cadena 15:07
Yes, and I wanted to put the cows in the center of the stage of making land, making Earth, terraforming. Making cows genetically, breeding them, is a very specific way of terraforming that will have the power to either regenerate soils, or will have the power to continue the destruction of soils and land, depending on the relation between cows and handlers. When you design cows, genetically, you're also designing a landscape.
[Soundscape: Termites rustling]
James Fairhead 15:48
There's even a myth, which I was interested in from the Benty regions, which goes something like: God first divided the sky and the earth, and the land from the water, and the four cardinal points from each other, and then made the umbilical cord linking sky and earth and then created termites, the first animal to increase the earth, and then other animals and eventually people followed. God charged termites with eating all that's on Earth, except the spirit, and turning it into Earth. Termites are the elders of all creatures, they furnish the essence of nature before angels before everything. The termite is the first Mason of Masons. It's kind of the architect.
[Music: Peace Whorl – Hotspring]
Lynne Boddy 16:35
The higher termites and fungi have a mutualistic relationship as well. Below ground, in the nests of the termites, there is the fungus garden where they cultivate the fungus. They bring to the fungus food in the form of dead plant matter, leaves, wood, etc. The termites don't have the enzymes to break down this dead material. So it's of no direct nutritious value to them. But their partners, the fungi, do. They can break down the dead stuff and convert it into fungal material – highly nutritious, and the termites eat these. Together, these two organism flourish.
James Fairhead 17:14
And people see that those termite mounds actually produce, in the vicinity of them, really lush, better crops. Something that the termites are doing to render the place more fertile. In fact, people really struggle to get hold of a termite mound. When you demarcate a field from your neighbor, you sort of somehow put the line of demarcation across the mound.
Elaine Gan 17:37
I think of the vast spectrum of planting practices involving cultivars and cultivators, as responses to the making and remaking of soil. Soil is a recursive relation, always making while being remade. In other words, soil configures and composes its subjects and objects, cultivators and cultivars, while at the same time being configured and composed by them, by us, by the all possessed by Earth.
Asad Raza 18:08
Symbiosis between organisms raises the possibility of a larger meta-organism.
James Fairhead 18:15
And one of the strangest occasions for myself was hearing someone say that 'we are like termites', and I found that to be perplexing. I wasn't quite sure as an anthropologist, what on earth that meant, and it took years really to puzzle it out. In the sense that, wherever termites build the mounds, you tend to get vegetation very different to the vegetation around. Certain trees only grow where otherwise only grasses would grow. And so out of termite mounds, you get these extraordinary diverse ecologies. And people say we're like termite mounds, almost for that reason, because wherever you settled a village, you bring wood and burn wood, and you bring straw in for the thatch and you bring your crops in and from all the surrounding area, and you kind of bring everything to the village and everything that you bring, renders the village fertile. around every settlement in Kissi region of Republic of Guinea, where I was working, every settlement has around it sort of island of forest, just like termite mounds that all have their particular vegetation.
Yasmeen Lari 19:29
So we have to be thinking now of co-building and co-creation, and how do you bring everybody together to be able to create something that's no longer just, you know, your own kind of iconic building that you might have built? I find that people have so much potential because if you are using materials that they are used to, then they have also ideas and thoughts and also the creative process immediately comes into force, especially women. And they start really identifying with the structure and they start you know, beautifying it in the way that they do. Because nobody else can do it as well. And so the concept that I had, or whatever I might have designed, becomes something quite different. It transformed into a thing of beauty suddenly, you know. And I think what is very interesting about building with tradition, and with these local materials, like you know, I only use clay and earth, and bamboo and lime. And suddenly, by making a Pakistan chulah, for instance, which is nothing but an urban platform with a well-designed smokeless stove, that that itself provides dignity to women. I mean, it's suddenly from sitting on the floor and inhaling all the smoke with this open fire stove, that they normally have, They are now sitting on an elevated platform, which is really an earthen throne, if you like. And suddenly everything changes about them, they become much more confident, and suddenly, there's much more respect for them. So architects is not just that we create something tangible or a form or something, but it can actually really influence the way that people around you start behaving towards you, or the way that you start behaving with others.
James Fairhead 21:02
Farmers in this region, they say that the very best soils are the soils of old settlement sites. And what's going on here is that, that people through working on land and through concentrating fertility, are almost switching the soils on. They're upgrading them, and the charcoal that comes from the ash of the fires that people are lighting every day to do the cooking and other materials get seeping into the soil making layer upon layer of darker Earth, that then becomes super fertile soils. So good soils are the things that are produced by people. The very same soils that ecologists from here are construing as natural, and the baseline from which to understand degradation, are in fact, the very same soils, those that are historically produced by people – showing just how much people have created that soil. So what people have created is being used against them, and in very disastrous ways, because we do need to understand how soils can be generated in actually quite relatively quick time.
Alex McBratney 22:19
We probably lost half the carbon out of the soil. And people don't realize, when we talk about carbon and global warming, most of the terrestrial carbon is in the soil, not in the vegetation above the soil, but actually in the soil. And what we need to do is to reverse that, to put more carbon back into the soil which we're trying to do, and then we can start building it back.
James Fairhead 22:43
It doesn't take millennia to produce these thick, dark earth soils. It takes a decade or two.
[Music: maridi / island – Barren House]
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 22:51
Making the soil visible, seeing the soil, can actually be thought as an ecological anomaly. We can think here with soil advocates calling out on the plight of soils made bare, arguing for literally re-covering soils.
James Fairhead 23:06
And gradually began to understand that the soil isn't just something that kind of is there naturally, and that is gradually eroded away, which is a very British kind of way of understanding the soil. But the soil isn't like that – the soil is a sort of a matrix that is given life by things.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 23:25
These are soils of biblical significance. The origins of these soil people are not any soil either, but clay and red dust.
Sumayya Vally 23:34
Kullukum li Adam wa aadam min turab
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 23:37
In Hebrew, Adamah is the red clay that made Adam.
Sumayya Vally 23:41
Everyone is from Adam, and Adam is from dust.
Thandi Loewenson 23:46
In fact, graphite has almost always been a part of us, as long as there has been an 'us' to speak of at all. Graphite is one of about a dozen minerals found in the interstellar grains of the earliest meteorites we have encountered. The cosmic primordial soup. birthed in the Big Bang, was formed of three ingredients: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. And it was only much later in the belching and burping byproducts of an insatiable consumption of these elements, so called nuclear fusion in stars, that carbon and oxygen would form, taking mineral form in molecular clouds of diamonds, graphite oxides, carbides, nitrates, and silicates. When working with graphite, you should really wear a mask and gloves, as, in its generosity, it gets everywhere. It is inhaled, ingested and absorbed. It becomes a part of you. As one commenter on the Deviant Art message board says, you really don't want to get black lung just because you huffed a bunch of pencil dust.
[Soundscape: Exhale]
Sumayya Vally 24:49
Date: 2002. Material Composition: forensic studies show dust particles made up of soil, ski, flesh, glass, cocaine, brick, concrete, cyanide. Speed: 1800 meters per second. In a recent lecture, Eyal Weizman described an anecdote one of his colleagues in Palestine. "His neighbourhood was turning into dust. He was coughing and he was saying 'I am breathing my house'. He was literally breathing in his house, his street, his ground, his family". Clouds include everything pulverised by a bomb that a building once was."
Daisy Lafarge 25:25
And when she inhaled clouds of perlite, felt them curdle her blood becoming thought. Floor is lava. Eyes are algae. Ash is rock trying to become air.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 25:41
Soils are material and symbolic investments of nationalism and colonial powers that reduce them to territorial conceptions of land and exclusionary forms of belonging, including blood and soil narratives.
Thandi Loewenson 25:57
In 'Black Holes: a Brief History of Time', M NourbeSe Philip gives us a number of re-articulated, re-figured cosmic definitions of the universe. Philip writes, "Space-time: The four dimensional space whose points are events. You cannot talk about space as it relates to Black people- to African people- without talking about movement or moving through space. And once you talk about moving through space as it relates to Africans, then you must confront the forces that prohibit or restrict that moving".
Adham Faramawy 26:28
I was naturalized as a British citizen in 1991 because my sister, Bassma, was born in London. My mother worked hard for this and she stayed. My father refused the passport and eventually left. Naturalized. Naturalized – what is that really? Like really, what is it?Where are we natural in this place before that point? In this place, natural, desirable. Where does the body feel wanted?
Sumayya Vally 27:08
Date: 2 billion years ago. Material Composition: Gold (Au) found in quartzite and pyrite ore - specific gravity of 19.3. Speed: Thirty foot crater impact - about 20 Km per second. Immediate impact, about a billion years of geological shift.
Tim Ingold 27:28
The very earth that had once offered the nourishment and support for human life came to be recast as a repository of resources to be blended. So archaeological excavation take it as a mere Prelude to a program of extraction on an industrial scale that has ravaged the earth.
Sumayya Vally 27:50
A meteor strike to the Earth's crust, drove gold to the Earth's surface in Joburg. In 1886. Gold is discovered, a connection to deep time is brought to the surface. Black labor forces are brought from all over the country to mine the land. Deaths in the mine through silicosis, tuberculosis, and other forms of lung disease are common. There is violence in breathing in parts of Joburg, there is a violence in breathing in parts of Joburg
[Music: aril / leavetaking– Barren House]
Thandi Loewenson 28:23
That this space program was unfolding against the backdrop of Zambian independence is pertinent. As an Namwali Serpell has written about beautifully, Nkoloso's work throughout his life was closely associated with an active struggle for the emancipation of black people in the region from British colonial control. Alongside the space program, in seeking to make the break from colonialism, the newly independent Zambian government undertook a series of economic and social reforms that would radically restructure relations between people, property and the earth. Through the abolition of private property, and the nationalization of the mines, the country's land and minerals will no longer matter for generating profit, but rather matter that had the means to enrich the lives and futures of the Zambian population. Towards the same ends, the concurrent Zambian space program required a black Zambians to craft a narrative in which black people were themselves no longer seen as resources as minerals. And were not only free to flourish on Earth, but could aspire to even greater heights too. That this group of Zambian astronauts never made it into orbit is neither here nor there. This was a project that was not solely concerned with leaving the earth. Nor was it preoccupied with a future emancipation. Arguably, in conceiving of and constructing the program, the journey Nkoloso sought to undertake was already successful.
Adham Faramawy 29:50
I've been giving it some thought, and it turns out I don't care where I'm native, or where my body belongs. Sweat in my eye, bitten by flies, this is where I am right now. It's fertile here. And for better or worse, this is where all thrive.
[Soundscape: Windchimes]
Elizabeth Povinelli 30:13
I grew up in the sweltering heat of North Western Louisiana. In the summers the air was so humid. it mocked the distinction between liquid and gas. I would feel a deep identification with the phrase 'fish out of water', unable to breathe the air that threatened to become water. My siblings and I would pray for the walls of rain that would concentrate themselves and then rage across the landscape, dropping the temperature 20 degrees in their wake. But then leaving behind more steam, as the blistering concrete streets boiled away their remainders. Now, no matter how hot the summers were, I preferred them to the northern winters we left behind. I was born in Buffalo, New York in the frigid February. We'd often go back there to visit our family and especially our grandparents, and great aunts and uncles. Even in August, it was too cold in Buffalo for me to consider cannonballing into my cousin's pool. My father's parents, uncles and aunts didn't think it was cold enough. They'd tell increasingly outlandish stories of life on the glaciers just above our ancestral village in Trentino. They made it seem like the best humans were defined by the capacity to withstand ice and ice water, icy winds, ice capped Alps. They clearly thought their mountains, their cascades, their rivers and valleys made them special, and that their village and its way of life was better than all others. Begging the question of course, why were we in America?
[Soundscape: Car parking, descent down a gravel hill, the sound of a stream comes closer]
Elizabeth Povinelli 32:15
In the US, where we actually were, my father would pull out our Bel Air blue station wagon onto the side of mountain bridges. When we did our annual camping trips to the US West, he pulled my brothers out of the car and scrambled down the mountainside into the streams below. They would all come back, my brothers slightly blue and shaking. What is he doing to you? He's making us plunge into the icy waters because he wants us to be mountain men. He thinks withstanding ice water makes you strong.
[Soundscape: Australian bird calls, monsoon, air conditioning]
Elizabeth Povinelli 32:54
Little surprise that when I arrived in Darwin, Australia in the sweltering September 1984, I found myself environmentally at home. Here, in addition to the water, saturated air, and inland swamps, were saltwater seas, and a different pattern of fish of reptiles of amphibians, birds, snakes, and other animals that roamed through these regions. There were no mountains anywhere, and definitely no ice except what came out of one kind of machine and was conserved in another. Storms also came here, bigger and lasting much longer than I had known in Shreveport. Monsoons would pour for months on end until everything was in a state of mold and rot. Clothes, skins, buildings – didn't matter. Those with money could huddle inside with other machines that would cool their air. For those too poor to have these machines, we just sweltered and rotted. But I didn't merely encounter a new kind of water. As I came to know the Indigenous men and women who lived at Belyuen and across the Darwin Harbor, I slowly came to refashion the glacial identity that I had carried around with me in relation to the southern swamp.
[Soundscape: Windchimes]
Sean Cho A. 34:27
In the forest, the river mud hasn't been dry for years.
Elizabeth Povinelli 34:32
My Belyuen friends map human differences onto the types of water that define lands. For them, there are saltwater people, freshwater people and desert people, each with their own distinct sweat, ceremonial ways, ecological practices, forms of marriage and alliance. Most indigenous Belyuen folks are saltwater people. As are the members of the Karrabing Film Collective
Cecelia Lewis 35:05
Like we have Suntu group, who are kiyuk. They have they own place, own story about their own country. We have Trevor mob. They have their own country. Their own language. Their own story. We have Bwudjut mob. They have their own story. Emmiyengal have their own story here at Mabaluk. Menthayengal have their own story. All the Sugarbag mob. But we are still one mob. Even though we have different languages and different land. We’re all connected to one. We’re not differen’t, we’re all one. And that makes us Karrabing.
Elizabeth Povinelli 35:41
Karrabing acknowledge that there are many parts of existence, the more than human world, who are creating their own patterns of existence, in relation to Karrabing, but are not defining those patterns of existence for Karrabing or necessarily even for the human world. For humans to stay in the pattern they are, they must allow others, human and otherwise, to make worlds for their own reason, toward their own ends, in their own designs.
Tim Ingold 36:19
You go to the beach and you're watching the waves rolling in, and you say, oh, a wave, you know, it's a short term thing. It's ephemeral. That wave, a few seconds, and it's broken, and it's gone. That's the end of it. No more wave. You think waves – short term. But then you think, but these waves have been coming in and breaking on the shore for billions of years, for as long as no anybody cares, longer than there have been any humans around. So that actually to attune your consciousness to the waves is absolutely not to be caught in that present moment. it's to see that in that present moment is a whole eternity.
Oula Valkeapää 37:03
<In Finnish> Time and the river look alike
[Music: El Lenguaje de las Plantas – Kanahuaxtli]
Angelica Patterson 37:11
As certain populations of tree species become less resilient to a changing climate, many scientists and forest managers are debating the actions that could be taken to help conserve forest communities. Assisted migration, or the intentional movement of organisms to places that would increase the probability of their future persistence has become a hot topic of debate. The ethics of these actions prompts us to ask ourselves if humans should even intervene. Should we aim to preserve our lands, and manage to keep them the same, or accept change and let things go? Perhaps it is the end of the wild, and striving to maintain our forests to how they looked pre-colonialism is untenable.
Kathleen Harisson 37:59
You know, there are many versions of this story. In all of these ocean-going cultures of the Pacific in which you know, there's Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia – there's so many islands and so many chapters of this gradual diaspora out into the islands. And people would settle on an island and they'd stay for many generations. And then something would occur: overpopulation, or a famine, or a fight or, or a vision – there's another place.
[Music: The Library of Mind Dancing – You’re Me]
Kathleen Harisson 38:31
And they have to make a choice, because they're always going to a new world they haven't seen before. They haven't heard from anybody from the New World, uninhabited islands across the Pacific. And so we have to make a choice. When we're going into this new world, what if none of the plants we know, live in that world? What if our key food plants aren't there? What if our key medicine plants? What if the plant we make our clothing from the plant that we use for glue the plant that is our main prayer plant? What if they're not there? So how do we choose? We have 50 people in our outrigger, and we don't know if we'll be at sea for weeks or months. We have to feed those 50 people, so we have to take the food, but we also have to take plant starts to plant in this new world because we have no idea what's there. And so every time these migrations happened – untold times, and we don't have historical records of any but the very latter stages, like when Hawaii was settled in the last 1500 years, that kind of thing. But at every stage, people made a selection of their plants. And generally how it's thought of is that they chose 20 to 24 species. And those were the species that thought they couldn't live without, and then they'd keep those alive till they got to the next place.
Kathleen Harisson 39:49
These days in Hawaii, the canoe plants are often referred to because they know what they brought in the two migrations from two different Island groups that came to Hawaii, the Marquesas and Tahiti. They know the plants that actually came on the boats. And that category 'canoe plant' then seems so instructive to me because those are the plants that they knew they would need and their descendants would need. But in a way, they're also their key categories that can't be lived without. It's like a language plants that make our life possible.
Simone Kotva 40:25
Plants by far exceed animals and human beings in their attentiveness to what is going on around them. And with regard to the levels of light, heat, moisture, movement vibration, they are constantly in touch with the elements.
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett 40:40
Sphagnum palustra. Blunt leaved bog moss
[Music: El Lenguaje de las Plantas – Kanahuaxtli]
Simone Kotva 40:45
What scientific study of plants reveals is that there is here a mode of life expertly aware of its environment and moreover, communicating this expertise and awareness to other organisms, through chemical reactions and minute movements in the subsurface. Like every sensitive thing on the planet, plants are aware. Their life differs from ours only by degree. At the same time, the plants awareness seems quite different from our own. Humans tend to pay attention to nature when the elements do not cooperate with us, upsetting our plans. Plants, by contrast, are never unaware of what happens. Their mode of attention is one of radical openness, the paradisiacal ability to attend to oneself and to the others in absolute openness.
Adham Faramawy 41:36
The smell of the air is subtle, various, and sweet. The ground not solid but springy. a collaboration of living things and the elaborate death of leaves and trees. There was no seeing everything at once. No certainty, as it should be. There is nothing pure in this place.
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett 42:01
Palustre is a marsh, but if you're classed by where you come from, you're the edge that meets the soften, you're the coughing of blossom giving way to wood. Woven leaves, no sleeves, a shallow. Pink is an afterthought, peach is the leaf you brought. Your fleshy, soft and outer, your hard a nutless butter. Nothing in that isn't soft, nothing out of it isn't soft. Nothing in that isn't soft, nothing out that isn't soft.
[Music: Impossibly Afraid of What – Hidden Sky]
Long Litt Woon 42:31
On a ramble through the fungi kingdom, the senses have to be switched on, the mind tuned in. I sense something new. Therefore, I am a new person.
Simone Kotva 42:45
The closest analogy in human experience would be the awareness our skin has of the environment and awareness, we cannot choose not to have. A fundamental, yet indefinable alertness.
Andrew Adamatzky 42:58
if you talk about the speed of fungal computing, then bits of the spike is about 20 minutes. Therefore, basically fungal computing is very very slow. Because mushrooms have nowhere to rush. They're kind of immortal we can say, and when you're immortal, you can compute very slow.
Filipa Ramos 43:11
We humans have this propensity, this desire, to reduce behaviors and modes of existence that are so different to us to something that we can understand and therefore reducing them to our own scale and logic. But at the same time, it's a propensity that is embedded very often in the desire to understand, and the desire to comprehend in a way that we have to reduce it in order to for us to understand what does it mean to be a mushroom? Or what does it mean to be a mycelium network?
[Music: The Library of Mind Dancing – You’re Me]
Merlin Sheldrake 43:29
It's a real pickle. And it's a tension that I don't think it's going to go anywhere anytime soon. But I think it's important to spend time in this tension, to feel it out, to be tugged this way and that.
Merlin Sheldrake 44:01
The basic pickle is when we anthropomorphize other organisms, non-human organisms, we try to understand them using human terms, human concepts. And in doing so we make it difficult to understand them on their own terms. So there are a few problems with this. One is that when we try to avoid anthropomorphism, studiously – I was trained in the natural sciences, and there are all sorts of ways we're warned against using human terms to understand other organisms – then too often, I think we end up using quite mechanistic language to understand them. We frame non-human organisms somehow as automata, as pre-programmed robots responding automatically to stimuli from their environment. And this, I think, is a kind of cryptic anthropomorphism because in this mechanistic language. We're making out these organisms to be machines. But humans are the only organisms to build machines. So I think we smuggle anthropomorphism in through our mechanism, and so get in a pickle that way.
Merlin Sheldrake 45:02
But I think at the root of our problem with this is what we choose to call human concepts in the first place. If you say another organism has feelings, and then that's being anthropomorphic, then you're suggesting that humans are the only organisms to have feelings. That may well be what you think, and if you do think that, then that would be anthropomorphic. But it also may very well be the case that your understanding your opinion, your intuition, these organisms also have feelings. And if you say they have feelings, then then you're referring simply to the fact that they're having feelings in their own way. So what we do there was we deepen and expand the concept of feeling to encompass all the different kinds of feelings that might exist in the living world.
[Music: Forest Ferns Mossy Earth – Greenplant]
Merlin Sheldrake 45:41
I think our allergy to anthropomorphism speaks to often of a species narcissism and exceptionalism that prevents us from attributing these qualities, these abilities to non-humans. Natasha Myers writes hilariously about Charles Darwin when he is figuring the lives and behaviors of orchids and orchid flowers. And she discusses the way that Darwin talks about orchid flowers in terms of a man's body. He said, this flower is a bit like a man bent over with his arm around the side in his hand coming up to meet the other hand, and then you end up with this picture in your mind of Darwin standing there balancing on one leg, contorting his body into the shape of an orchid flower. And then the question is, is he practicing phytomorphism – Phytomorphism? Is he being vegetalized by the flower? Is he trying to understand the flower in the flowers terms? Or is he being anthropomorphic? Is he using the terms of the human body to understand that flower's body? And you end up in this shifting space between the two. And then you recognize that we are also influenced by the world around us.
Lucia Pietroiusti 46:44
I absolutely love that you say this because I think one of the things that has emerged through this series that we feel very strongly is the fact that actually anti-anthropomorphism is entirely anthropocentric.
Simone Kotva 46:57
Naturally, we anthropomorphize. But since the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds, speaking humanly about the non-human is scientifically accurate as well as accurately ethical.
Oula Valkeapää 47:14
<In Finnish> It's strange that we think of ourselves as detached, self-contained. I think we are part of the whole. We are manifestations of the whole. We are energy in energy that flows in us. Through us. It's left behind as well, in some other form. It's so unreal – just when I thought I caught a snow crystal, it melted.
Tim Ingold 48:03
Modern sensibilities are profoundly conditioned by the idea that everything is formed of layers. The ground, trees, buildings, books, and even human minds are built up layer upon layer, with each layer already marked up with its own strations. The past then, is visible only by way of the translucence of the present. We have to be able to see through the present to see the past. But the ground as a surface teaches us otherwise. It tells us that with the passage of time, material is not added but worn away through erosion. Our oldest memories then are not the deepest.
[Music: YEARN2DREAM – YaYa Bones]
Ayesha Tan Jones 49:25
Your soul is fertile just like soil, and your dreams can be composted and they will flourish into new life, breathing deeply into this unconscious, knowing that your body has to become soil. Once your soul departs, you are eartheart. The boundaries betwixt you and the soil are porous, let their wisdom speak through you now. Feel the energy of the microbes, the nutrients and minerals take root through your skin into your system. We have always been like this. Some of us just forgot.
Adam Huggins 50:41
The Story of the Understory of the Understory
Mendel Skulski 50:47
Featuring the voices of Andrew Adamatzky, Sean Cho A., Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Lynne Boddy, Marisol de la Cadena, James Fairhead, Adham Faramawy, Elaine Gan, Kathleen Harrison, Tim Ingold, Ayesha Tan Jones, Asim Khan, Simone Kotva, Daisy Lafarge, Yasmeen Lari, Cecilia Lewis, Thandi Loewenson, Alex McBratney, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Angelica Patterson, Lucia Pietroiusi, Elizabeth Povinelli, Maria Puig de la Bellacassa, Filipa Ramos, Asad Raza, Merlin Sheldrake, Oula Valkeapää, Sumayya Vally, Long Litt Woon, and Jay G Ying.
Adam Huggins 51:42
Music by Cat Can Do, Scott Gailey, Hotspring, Yu Su, Barren House, Kanahuaxtli, You're Me, Hidden Sky, Greenplant, YaYa Bones, and Sunfish Moon Light.
Mendel Skulski 52:02
Editing and mixing by Mendel Skulski.
Adam Huggins 52:05
Special thanks to Kostas Stasinopoulos, Holly Shuttleworth, Suzanne Husky, and of course, the Serpentine Galleries.
Mendel Skulski 52:15
Future Ecologies is an independent podcast, produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski. Find more at futureecologies.net
Adam Huggins 52:25
This podcast is made possible with the support of our amazing patrons. Join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies
Mendel Skulski 52:34
If we’ve left you hungry for more details on the science of soil, and all of its diverse cohabitants, check out the podcast “Life in the Soil”, produced by Anja Krieger and Matthias Rillig.
Mendel Skulski 52:49
To hear the rest of the conversations that were part of this episode, follow the link in the show notes to the Serpentine Galleries YouTube playlist.
Mendel Skulski 52:59
Okay, that's it. Thanks for listening.