Strata Incognita

This experimental short film was featured in the Spanish Pavilion at the 2023 Architecture Biennale, which was entitled "Foodscapes. The Laboratory of the Future." Its creators (architects, filmmakers, and cinematographers who founded two production companies) use the expressive tools of experimental and artistic audiovisual media to project new spatial and vital concepts with which to compose a better world.

Synopsis A few inches beneath your feet, millions of creatures kill, eat, reproduce, ally, and fight each other. They recompose death into life, purify the water you drink, make the air you breathe breathable, and produce 95% of the food you eat. You are digested soil. Every time you eat, the substances in the soil are reconstituted into the matter that makes you up. However, many of the creatures and ecosystem processes that make soils function resist being captured by methods of knowledge production still constrained by the regimes of the visible. Soil is our closest alien world.

Strata Incognita proposes a trans-scale and trans-temporal journey through the geographies that articulate soil as infrastructure for food cultivation, but also as an ecosystem and somatic archive of crimes, memories, and mythologies.

The short film navigates the hidden landscapes that build and destroy soils, connecting the biological and chemical processes that occur underground with the industrial production of pesticides, fertilizers, and biostimulants, as well as with the geopolitical and environmental conflicts associated with their production and distribution.

In a traveling staging, four mysterious agents intervene in the soil, appropriating the paraphernalia of the scientific laboratory and archaeological excavation, while transforming their aesthetics of truth and expert certainty into weapons of dialectic and political imagination. Strata Incognita invites us to think about other ways of cultivating our relationship with the soil and to unlearn the epistemic assumptions that underpin our hyper-extractive approach to this world that is as close as it is strange.

[Source: La casa de la arquitectura].