SOIL STEWARDS to SOILISTIC BODIES

Artwork 2024

SOIL STEWARDS to SOILISTIC BODIES

Initiated by the municipality De Wolden as part of the art and design festival Wiede Wold to celebrate their cultural anniversary around the theme ‘The Future of the Rural’, convened by curators Lisa Hardon & Jorn Konijn, and developed by artist Liselore Frowijn from Studio Frowijn, Soil Stewards to Soilistic Bodies unfolds as an interconnected triptych: a sculpture, a soundscape, and an essay. The work encourages humans to rethink relationships with soil, by foregrounding the often overlooked minorities within the living soil: worms. By observing how these hermaphroditic soil stewards interact with the earth, Studio Frowijn’s artwork in De Wolden investigates how we could relate to the soil differently.

The interactive sculpture breaks open the sublime surroundings of the village Echten and embodies a life-sized clumped hope of worms forming a gate symbolizing the interconnected space by its position between the rural municipality of De Wolden and the city of Amsterdam, where the artist lives. Entering the gate, a motion sensor a-rhythmically shuffles alternated audio fragments as a soundscape in which thinkers and (more-than-)human social actors, all relating to soil in various dynamics, allegorically refer to Liselore’s online essay Imagining Soilscapes, Or Queering Common Ground. Nestle down in Echten and immersive yourself with further thoughts on the soil from philosopher Marjan Slob, soil expert Ruud Hendriks, poets and activists, children from Echten, queer archivist anne krul, biological farmers from the Naoberhoeve, biodiversity scientist Elaine van Ommen Kloeke, and many more voices to be heard.

The online essay shares multiple soilstories, exposing past and present gender-constructed conceptions of commodified soil. It pleads as a manifesto to no longer exploit soil as a primarily inert supplier of raw materials, whilst recognizing it as a vibrant network of relationships, such as with the hermaphroditic worm which is essential for earth’s unique humus formation. The worm’s queerness is linked to the notion of the relational, where intertwined observations of non-binary worms in the soil function as a metaphor for embodied queer relationships with the landscape.

By imagining relational queer futures together with the help of decolonial voices and the observation of hermaphrodite worm-soil relations, this trilogy openly imagines the future of the rural as a partly opaque field of aesthetics. Hence: under our feet, where the body of our living soil is beautiful.