Strata Incognita

This experimental short film was part of the Spanish Pavilion at the 2023 Architecture Biennale, which was presented under the title “Foodscapes. The Laboratory of the Future”. Its creators (architects, filmmakers and directors of photography, founders of two production companies) use the expressive tools of experimental and artistic audiovisual work to project new spatial and vital concepts aimed at shaping a better world.

Synopsis: Just a few centimetres beneath your feet, millions of creatures kill, eat, reproduce, ally and fight with each other. They transform 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 in the soil are reconstituted into the matter that makes you. Yet many of the creatures and ecosystem processes that keep soils functioning 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 transtemporal journey through the geographies that articulate soil as an 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, fertilisers and biostimulants, as well as with the geopolitical and environmental conflicts associated with their production and distribution.

In an itinerant mise-en-scène, four mysterious agents intervene in the soil, appropriating the paraphernalia of the scientific laboratory and archaeological excavation, while transforming their aesthetics of truth and forensic certainty into dialectical weapons and tools of political imagination. Strata Incognita invites us to rethink how we cultivate our relationship with soils and to unlearn the epistemic assumptions that underpin our hyper-extractive approach to this world that is both so close and so strange.

[Source: La Casa de la Arquitectura].