This experimental short film participated in the Spanish Pavilion at the 2023 Architecture Biennale, titled “Foodscapes. The Laboratory of the Future.” Its creators (architects, filmmakers, and cinematographers, founders of two production companies) use the expressive tools of experimental and artistic audiovisual work to project new spatial and vital concepts aimed at composing a better world.
Synopsis: Just a few centimeters beneath your feet, millions of creatures kill, eat, reproduce, ally, and fight with one another. They recombine death into life, purify the water you drink, make the air you breathe breathable, and produce 95% of the food you consume. You are digested soil. Every time you eat, the substances from the soil are reconstituted into the matter that makes up your body. However, many of the creatures and ecosystem processes that make soils function resist being captured by knowledge production methods still constrained by regimes of visibility. Soil is our closest alien world.
Strata Incognita proposes a trans-scalar and trans-temporal journey through the geographies that structure soil as an infrastructure for food cultivation, but also as an ecosystem and a somatic archive of crimes, memories, and mythologies.
The short film navigates the hidden landscapes that build and destroy soils, linking the biological and chemical processes occurring underground with the industrial production of pesticides, fertilizers, and bio stimulants, as well as with the geopolitical and environmental conflicts associated with their production and distribution.
In an itinerant 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 tools for dialectics and political imagination. Strata Incognita invites us to rethink ways of cultivating our relationship with soils 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]