Strata Incognita

This experimental short film was featured in the Spanish Pavilion at the 2023 Architecture Biennale, held under the title “Foodscapes: The Future Laboratory.” Its creators—architects, filmmakers, and cinematographers who founded two production companies—use the expressive tools of experimental and artistic audiovisual language to project new spatial and vital concepts aimed at shaping a better world.

Synopsis: Just a few centimeters beneath your feet, millions of creatures kill, eat, reproduce, ally, and fight among themselves. 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 of 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 trans-temporal journey through the geographies that articulate soil—not only as an infrastructure for food cultivation but also as an ecosystem and a somatic archive of crimes, memories, and mythologies.