Strata Incognita

This experimental short film took part in the Spanish Pavilion at the 2023 Architecture Biennale, under the theme “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 language to propose new spatial and existential concepts that imagine a better world. Synopsis: A few centimeters beneath your feet, millions of creatures kill, eat, reproduce, ally themselves, and fight one another. 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 from the soil reconstitute themselves into the matter that composes you. Yet many of the creatures and ecosystem processes that make soil function resist capture through knowledge-production methods still constrained by regimes of visibility. The soil is our closest alien world. Strata Incognita proposes a trans-scalar and trans-temporal journey through the geographies that shape soil as an infrastructure for growing food, 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, connecting the biological and chemical processes occurring underground with the industrial production of pesticides, fertilizers, and biostimulants, as well as with the geopolitical and environmental conflicts associated with their distribution and use. In an itinerant mise-en-scène, four mysterious agents intervene in the soil, appropriating the paraphernalia of scientific laboratories and archaeological excavation while transforming their aesthetics of truth and forensic certainty into dialectical tools and political imagination. Strata Incognita invites us to imagine new ways of cultivating our relationship with soil and to unlearn the epistemic assumptions underlying our hyper-extractive approach to a world that is as close as it is strange. [Source: La Casa de la Arquitectura].