The language used for Acknowledgement of Country declarations presents only half of what is being confronted through the speech. While practising reparation through placing colonial occupation within the larger history of a territory, it does not manage to encompass what ‘Country’ represents or the ‘care’ for it that the settlers are beholden to; missing what is lost that requires redress. This is not to say that reminders of such unspoken/unseen violence are not required. Country, for indigenous folks, encompasses not only land but every aspect of the environment. It forms an intrinsic part of how they understand their knowledge, cultural practices and responsibilities.
“Caring for Country is holistic, with the physical interconnected with the social, the cultural and the spiritual. Sustainable environmental practices are embedded in our culture through traditional hunting, harvesting and managing plants and animals. Our cultural expressions reflect our symbiotic relationship with Country,” writes Zena Cumpston, a Barkandji researcher and author in Australia State of the Environment 2021: Indigenous. It’s worth noting then that the language used for landscapes tells vital stories. Soil is seen as a resource, land and territory imply possession; while terra holds and nurtures. The soil is not neutral but a living entity, holding the memories of civilisations while also burying them. Bringing these stories and our relationships to soils to the fore through translocal engagements with the environment, the Van Abbemuseum presents Soils, on view from June 15 – November 24, 2024.
Palestinian scholar Munir Fasheh’s conception of four soils undergirds the exhibition’s exploration of soil as a subject. Fasheh urges humans to nurture the earth soil, the communal soil, the cultural soil and the spiritual soil in order for these to nurture all planetary life in return. Rendering soil as this multidimensional entity, with the implication of its presence in conceptualising the cultural and spiritual realms of humans, further outlines our interconnectedness with natural systems, ecologies and processes. The indigenisation of the museum for the showcase, as Victoria Lynn, director of the TarraWarra Museum of Art refers to, presents a perspective that views art and design as processes of engaging with the world, rather than simply representing or remaking it. The exhibition features interactive installations, sound installations, video works and photographs and is one of the iterations of the Soils project, an ongoing research initiative by the Eindhoven-based museum developed in collaboration with the TarraWarra Museum of Art and Yogyakarta-based collective Struggles for Sovereignty. The art exhibition was previously presented at the TarraWarra Museum of Art and will be displayed in Jogjakarta in 2025. The Van Abbemuseum iteration of the project also included a collaboration with master’s students from the Design Academy Eindhoven during the recently concluded Dutch Design Week.
At its core is the notion that soils bind us together and yet present specific, situated conditions that define us, lodged in the natural landscapes we tread. It re-presents ‘Country’ or soils not only as a medium to tangibly express narratives of exploitation and extraction but as a subject and active participant in thinking through the origins of cultures and humanity. “The soil, the Earth, is something we have in common. The soil exists in Mexico, Australia and The Netherlands. It’s something that brings us together. Soils is a way to use art as a means to make the connection with the Earth visible and tangible again for people in and outside Eindhoven. We’re so focused on technology and progress, on exhausting the Earth. We forgot we also have to stay friends with the Earth,” notes Charles Esch, former director of the VanAbbemuseum and co-curator of the showcase along with Teresa Cos Rebollo. Conceived over the course of 8 years, it brings together contemporary artists, designers, activists, farmers and scholars from Australia, The Netherlands and Indonesia to explore these complex and diverse relationships; underpinning how soils bring attention to the ongoing, long-term effects of colonialism, industrialisation and environmental degradation.
In the face of the climate crisis, incessant land and resource depletion, overproduction, (labour) exploitation and pollution; the showcased artists discursively highlight the struggles and resilience of Indigenous communities all over the world to hold forth on their ground. As recent as August of this year, the proposal to recognise and grant political agency to First Nations people in the Australian constitution was rejected, communities continue to be displaced to make way for mega-development projects all over the world, annihilation in the aftermath of (neo)colonial occupation continues to devastate Palestine; all matters that concern territory and render the exhibition’s theme especially significant. In the face of such slow violence, the exhibition crucially asks, “How can we re-ground ourselves in our environment?”
Where do we begin the material work of reparation and repatriation and how do we begin? If we look closely at the history of the Van Abbemuseum or even the TarraWara Museum in Victoria where the exhibition was previously exhibited, we confront ourselves with histories of colonial occupation and indentured labour (Dutch occupation in Indonesia and Australian settler contexts). This entangled history is made material with Melbourne-based artist Tom Nicholson’s 33 Bricks (Towards a Monument to Batman’s Treaty) (2008 – 2024) where Nicholson takes 33 bricks from the brick facade of the museum in Eindhoven, placing them within the exhibition space as sculptures that tell stories about the occupation of Naarm/Melbourne in Australia and counter-stories around bricks and invasion.
Consider the chromatographs of Steffie de Gaetano and Giulia Pompilj as one enters the exhibition space or those in Megan Cope and Keg de Souza’s Soil Stories of Coranderrk (2023). In them, the soil assumes layers, whirls that contain worlds of the more than human. Interdisciplinary researchers de Gaetano and Pompilj’s The Matter We Share (2024) set off the exhibition bringing to light the ill effects of industrialisation and pollution of the Dommel River, complementing Diewke van den Heuvel’s Melting Heart Connected (2022) which presents documentary evidence of the climate crisis with images of glaciers melting plastered at one end of the room. Both tangibly portray the climate crisis and our incessant depletion of landscapes by extraction and defilement, through the slowly shifting landscapes of The Netherlands and the Arctic.
Australian Aboriginal artist Megan Cope and Keg de Souza’s Soil Stories of Coranderrk (2023) adds another perspective to this by depicting the many worlds of soil with earth maps that were collected from significant places in Coranderrk, one of the oldest Aboriginal reserves that was closed in 1924, dispossessing the people who lived there. The maps reveal traces of diverse cultural and historical stories of the land, showing a complex, multiple understanding of place. Stories of soil foreground situated knowledge, or vernacular practices passed down through generations that respect and honour the earth, depicted also in Brooke Wandin’s sound installation that family recording of the Woiwurrung language of Wurundjeri Country. The work particularly spotlights the intrinsic relationship of languages and landscapes, where language is a core means to understand the landscape, but also landscape often influences and transforms language. This is also presented through the many local and global stories in the Story Room section of the exhibition.
Adat (Indigenous) activist Yurni Sadariah and the Rangan Adat communities’ work, Rangan’s Paser Adat Territories Map (2024) further explores the deep engagement with the land and its people. Using oral historical knowledge to create the maps, they trace the slow mutation of Indonesian Rangan Paser Adat (Indigenous) territories due to their vandalisation by the expansion of palm oil plantations, deforestation and the Indonesian government’s transmigration program. The installation includes a video where members of the communities tell stories of the landscape and wooden replicas of traditional tools from Rangan depict how these lands were typically cared for by the community. These works find kinship with activist Lian Gogali and Institute Mosintuwu’s Ovariums of Nature (2024) who connects the ravaging of the ecologies in the Poso district by extractivist practices and changes to the patterns of food production with two murals that show diagrams of womens’ ovaries filled with native plant seeds from the region.
In all of the works, erasures of ways of being by extraction and exploitation are key, with artists intentionally choosing to platform of ways to be that shift the centre from dominant narratives of capitalism. Tracing these erasures in Mexico, Rolando Vázquez’s Typology of Erasure W1 and Typology of Erasure B1 (2024) portrays places where Mayan houses once stood but were demolished due to Hurricane Isidore on September 14th, 2002. The country’s disaster fund did not have any provisions that covered the repair of traditional houses, but only provided funds for building concrete structures. On the other hand, he also shows how popular culture paints Mayan civilisation as a thing of the distant past in ‘The Maya’ Under Western Eyes (2024).
Within the same space, Suumil Móokt’aan’s Xaanil naaj: la palabra desde el territorio (2024) resurrects this ‘long forgotten’ culture by constructing a Yucatán Mayan house, traditionally built with 13 different types of native trees; a practice that has become endangered due to rampant deforestation and land-grabbing for mega-projects. Presenting a hybrid culture perhaps more suited for the contemporary age, the roof is made of rye following a traditional Brabant technique. The hut becomes a space to gather, to reflect and tell stories. This material act of rebuilding what is fast disappearing is mirrored with another installation, Weaving a Pluriversity by the Pluriversity Weavers. The installation constructs a Casa Marunzama, traditionally built by the Iku people of Colombia, within the white walls of the art museum. The vernacular construction practice involves walking through the land to find living materials that are used for the house, weaving together land and people. The interactive installation contains responses by different artists who present ways to think about the memories that soils in their particularities hold; weaving stories into the soil.
These two installation designs in particular that point to acts of worlding and plural ways of being in the world are perhaps the most vital of all the works on display. In these stories are not only an acknowledgement of land and its resources but a binding together of nature and culture. Recent discourse for showcases that hope to showcase sustainability and sustainable design practices has shifted to trying to understand exploitation and extractivism through the lens of the more than human. These design exhibitions usually foreground Indigenous knowledge and ask visitors to consider what else is possible through our very imbrication in natural processes.
“What I find interesting about the soil as a subject is that we experience it as something that just exists. But there’s also history in the soil. What you see is the past, you see our current situation and it partly determines our future. It’s a mutual relationship you build with the soil. That’s what I find interesting and I hope it shows in the exhibition,” Esche comments on the relevance of the showcase. “We are compost, not posthuman,” reminds Donna Haraway, urging readers towards collective and collaborative responses to the crises of the world and against the deep chasm caused by modernity between the natural and cultural. Thinking with the soil and land, we can begin to rebuild “a world that contains other worlds”, rather than excluding those ideas that do not align with the dominant views of the Anthropocene. Through its narratives, the exhibition presents an invitation to take root, ground oneself not only in one’s particular landscapes but in the soil that covers the Earth.