In this conversation, biologist, landscape architect and human geographer Seth Denizen, and dancer, architect and researcher, Victoria McKenzie address the ground as a cosmopolitan archive. Both have been thinking deeply about soil and space, suggesting that it’s the little things that tell us the most.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's fourth Issue Terra Infirma.

SHUMI BOSE / KOOZ You both have practices which share an interest in the ground, but also in terms of being wilfully peripheral around normative practices of architecture. How did you find your way into thinking about the built environment?

SETH DENIZEN Well, I am a landscape architect — but it's true that I see my practice as something that extends outside that disciplinary fence, and it's been pieced together from three stray parts. I started out in biology, studying the evolutionary ecology of small Trinidadian fish. I moved to Landscape Architecture after spending a year in the Darien Gap in Panama. I was there to study environmental science, but everywhere I looked around me, incredible social and political problems were shaping the environmental systems that I was studying. Landscape architecture was a way of thinking about how to apply environmental knowledge. Pretty soon, that also became too small of a box, so I did this PhD in human geography, to assemble a new conceptual structure for myself. I'm still an aspiring biologist; I read a ton of scientific papers on a daily basis, but my research is really about people. In order to do that research, I am incapable of thinking without drawing, without mapping, as fundamental ways of trying to interpret the world.

KOOZ Thank you. Well, who wants clear, quantifiable definitions anyway? What about you, Victoria — how would you describe your own practice?

VICTORIA MCKENZIE Firstly, I want to hear more about these Trinidadian fishes; I'm half Trinidadian myself, though born in Jamaica. In terms of my relationship to architecture, I’ve grown up with a fascination with how bodies move through space; what dictates that movement, who has access to what types of spaces and how we care for them. Once you start thinking along those lines, you start to think about the injustices and ecologies that also intersect these spaces. I've always been a dancer; at college, I studied literature and critical theory, human geography and urban studies – again, trying to understand the logics of being in space – and found myself on a master's programme in research architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

KOOZ Perhaps we are taking as a given the obvious question of what soil has to do with architecture. Both your work addresses soil through several social, economic and cultural paradigms revealed not through looking at the scale of a building, but at something infinitely smaller. Do you ever have to justify this relationship, particularly in architectural academia?

SD It's a big challenge for architecture today to invent a new kind of materialism that's actually appropriate to our contemporary political moment. Architecture has historically relied on a pretty simplistic and conservative, natural-historical model in which scientists interpret the world and tell the architects what to do, then they do that, or fail to. I think part of what it means to live in our contemporary moment is to acknowledge the failure of that particular paradigm. That means that we have to invent new methodologies, and those have to work across multiple — and sometimes incompatible — epistemologies. So instead of thinking about architecture as a field that unquestioningly receives a framework inherited from the natural sciences, we have to go through a process of reinterpreting, of reworking, of interrogating the underlying structures of power and knowledge that produce scientific knowledge.

In some sense, we can't do anything without some sort of materialist practice: we are all working in the material world. When it comes to soils, soils are the black box of modernity. There is probably no material that modernity has so badly misinterpreted. In my opinion, it's the paradigmatic example: everything we don't understand about soil is probably everything we don't understand about climate change, about our contemporary environmental crisis, and how environmental justice is actually inextricable from questions of how we know and understand the world.

Some of my recent work has developed as an attempt to try to address this issue representationally. The idea was to change the way we think about soil by changing the way we “see” soil. As part of a seminar I ran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I developed a way of drawing soil algorithmically as a mixture of the human and non-human relationships that formed the soil we were studying. Often when I describe this I have to say formed and formed-in, as the causal structure of soil is always loopy. This is actually a lot of what makes it hard to think about. We're publishing a book later this year, called “Thinking Through Soil”, which explains this method in more detail.

VM I really like this phrase, ‘Everything we don't understand about soil is also what we don't understand about climate change.’ I'm also thinking about what it means to understand soil in terms of the contemporary, of our political moment.

In the public sphere, I think there's a really traditional understanding of soil as this unconsolidated material; the totality of organic material on the surface of the Earth. There's a techno-agricultural relationship that we understand as a society; that's how we've developed as a people or as a civilisation, but then all sorts of problematics have arisen through that. But there's a really interesting eco-feminist understanding of soil, in which soil becomes this multi-dimensional, multi-temporal spatiality: a space with many species and, many timelines, crossing in and out. So although fungi are a part of the soil community, who is to say that [they] cannot be considered a part of this dimension as well? To understand that dimension means also to understand how these various species work, their relationship to soil fertility, for example, and how we might care for that differently — thus design with, or design through that differently.

One limitation that comes up is a certain romantic idea of designing with soil — I often get this one — in terms of pre-colonial or vernacular ways of designing, or using traditional techniques like sun-dried adobe brick, which speaks to a very direct way of understanding the touch of soil. Now rammed earth, for example, is being carried over into the contemporary moment in a graceful way. Going back to what Seth was saying: we need something that is contemporary to the political moment. People need to ask themselves what is at stake when it comes to design. For instance, if we're designing sun-dried adobe brick structures, that means that there's a certain amount of upkeep involved. Traditionally speaking, that meant the community would come together frequently throughout the year and organise labour in that way. Maybe you make friends along the way; maybe you find a lover — who knows what sorts of contingencies are involved within that? But it would demand a different way of designing, and thus a different way of being as a community. So I think if we are to think about designing and re-understanding soil differently, that also means restructuring our human societies and rethinking the ways that we are also a part of the soil community, right?

KOOZ When so many of us seemingly want to live intractably globalised and consumerist lives — shifting materials and aesthetics from one place to another — what’s the feasibility of understanding where we are in terms of soil? To put it in a deliberately plaintive tone, it seems like an impossible task, to change behaviours by looking at something so small.

VMI feel that we have to lean into those impossibilities, in order to direct change — because it's through the small that we open up to the larger aspects of things. Also it's through the smallest sphere that you begin to see the various types of damage. I'm inferring the notion of a colonial blueprint as well: the type of damage in creating an enclosure and eradicating the commons; the type of damage in eradicating and desiccating whole species and indigenous peoples; the type of damage in terms of converting a temple into a resource (that being the forest); the type of damage in carrying over enslaved people to become a labour force.

If you think around those categories of what it took to create colonialism as a destructive space, then maybe we're able to operate on the negative of that — to understand what it takes to create a remediative space. I think that both Seth and I are interested in seeing the destructive but not just in cleaning up that mess; rather, understanding the flip-side, and thinking about what it takes to actually dream a new infrastructure. What do you think, Seth?

SD Oh, absolutely. You said it so well; we absolutely have to dream. What you said about damage reminds me of Eve Tuck’s warning against ‘damage-centred research’ — a programme of constantly characterising people as depleted, of landscapes being completely despoiled. We have to acknowledge those things, and take a careful inventory of them, but our research needs to be heading somewhere else. So the question becomes, where are we going? That's also part of what I love and why I've stuck with architecture: I do love the permission that architecture gives us to dream. Other disciplines don't have that permission.

I really hope that the research that we do is always pointing somewhere, and that arrow, that trajectory or momentum is something that our research can build. Maybe we don't arrive there, but we push in that direction. I really loved how Victoria started to pull on that thread of the small: what is small, how do we know if something is small or whether it can actually be quite large? Isn't that the fundamental question that globalisation has left us with? It has broken up our certainty over what is small and what is large. It's not that the small has become large or vice versa, but that we just don't know anymore. This is certainly true for soils. As you mentioned earlier, we have the entire global pharmaceutical industry in our soils now; things that were manufactured in Southeast Asia or Northern Europe are now in the soils of southern Mexico. And yet those soils are also specific and local; they have their own kind of trajectories. In some sense, soils are the entire cosmopolitical problem wrapped up into one thing. I mean, isn't it?

KOOZ You mentioned architecture being liberatory, in terms of permission to imagine and build a different world. I find your description of soil as containing multitudes of time, to be liberating in another way — especially understanding that it is subject to constant evolution.

VMWhat's great about what you're saying, Seth, is that not only is it a redefinition of re-entering soil; it’s also a redefinition of how we can understand sustainability, or what it takes to sustain something as it pertains to architectural practice. Because when you think on the level of the small and really trace it through — in Seth’s words, when you take a careful inventory — you end up following the strands to the point in which they re-cycle; that is, they enter an ecological cycle once more.

Without this understanding, metaphors like “the small” can fall flat upon themselves; for instance, we end up demonising substances like carbon. But carbon is all of life — it's gone a bad rep because of carbon dioxide and carbon excesses; we now need to mitigate all of this carbon. At the same time, all material existence is made up of carbon. We're just figuring out what timelines and spatialities that carbon belongs to, right? Thinking back to this careful inventory and the reading of landscapes takes you into that space of tracing the molecular; you witness how something happening over here will end up over there. Disaster teaches you that as well; for me, it was a radioactive disaster that taught me that, tracing Caesium 131 from Fukushima through bluefin tuna, all the way to the coast of California and into people's bodies and learning how that impacts the instances of leukaemia and various other cases of cancer. At this point, you recognise how the world is extremely interconnected — so getting to the molecular sphere, you're able to trace it back into this macrocosm once more, and thus enter the logics of sustainability.

SD When you start understanding carbon as you're describing, it also starts to reconfigure our capacity to envision or imagine alternative outcomes for social justice. It helps us start to unravel and reconfigure the Gordian knots of environmental justice that, without those kinds of perspectives, are actually impossible to untie.

In my own work, I’ve studied a set of communities in central Mexico who are demanding to live on toxic land. Their entire project is to preserve the toxicity of that land, in some sense, and to live there. Of course, the World Health Organization and government regulators want to tell them that they're wrong to want to live in that way; that their sense of the good life is incorrect. What drew me to that research is precisely this moment that you describe: without carefully unravelling the scales of materiality that produce certain landscapes, you cannot understand the social justice conflicts that are emerging today, in which the basic terms of toxicity have been turned around.

We used to think environmental justice was corporations dumping chemicals on poor communities and then the poor communities begging them to stop. So then we could all say, okay, Bad Corporation: don't put toxic chemicals in poor communities. If we're going to get our heads around the environmental justice conflicts that are arriving today, particularly with climate change, we need to start being able to think about environmental justice at the level of cycles, at the levels of systems; not just deciding whether a molecule or atom is toxic or non toxic, but as moments of toxicity, periods of toxicity, velocities of toxicity; the ebb and flow of toxicity. In some sense, we are all surfing the ebb and flow of these toxicities; we are not in a state of inside or outside, and the fantasy that we could be is what produces privileged environmental enclaves for wealthy climate nihilists… which is another important kind of toxicity.

KOOZ Right; we're just at various points of proximity to enduring effects that would forcibly change how we wish to live. You've both done work in the Global South, where we can see some of these changes and their damaging effects being experienced with greater severity. It seems that societies with the most resources unfairly burden those with the least agency, even as we learn from them. Can you speak to that?

VM Well, firstly I'm curious about what materials are present in this Mexican landscape. Maybe we can start to think about how toxicity was previously defined and how it can be defined now; through this redefinition, we might get to an understanding of how something is misplaced, and how it can be reinterpreted elsewhere. Fungi, for example, show us that crisis is always an opportunity; within ecological systems, waste is meant to be cycled, so it's no longer considered waste. So ‘the toxic’ presents another moment where differences in diversity can be recognised. If a particular sense of remediation doesn't work, then what material or species does have the ability to work within that space, or, maybe restore some sense of what we perceive as balance. I'm wondering what is this relationship between toxicity and balance, because I'm also thinking about how toxicity and balance in the landscape is also didactic to the immune system within the human body. I'm also thinking about redefining what the human being is as a terrain or a territory, with multiple species coming in and out. That stands against what the medical industrial complex or what the pharmaceutical complex stands for today, which is about eradicating or eliminating toxicity.

KOOZ You are not shy of upending concepts, are you: no longer bodies, we are a congregation of ecologies and species, temporarily held together…but when I hear about soil ‘contamination’ at the level of molecules and DNA, my first instinct is one of horror — am I being overly romantic about a nature that remains unchanged or ‘pure’?

VM It's very easy to fall into that realm where you're thinking about ‘the great before’, as if we're going to return to a “pure” time before colonial violence. As Seth was saying earlier, we need to understand this contemporary moment and that maybe something of the past can meet our dreams for the future and create something entirely new.

Going back to the lens of the Global South: lately I’ve been sitting with the colonial blueprint of climate change, how it is so present, and how it replicates so easily. Earlier, I spoke about mapping the colonial violence from the enclosures to the temple-forest, the eradication of indigenous people and species as well as forced and enslaved labour. Recently I met with a Congolese activist named Kamayugi Muhammed Ally of ‘Free Congo Now’, to learn about the current Genocide in Congo — although the history of war and extraction goes way back to the 1800s. It is a tumultuous time; there's a different mindset amongst the people within the Global South, by which a fragment of a colonial mindset still operates today. Ally spoke about mapping this type of violence through how the government encloses the second largest rainforest in the world — the only lasting rainforest with enough trees to mitigate or sink carbon levels, since the Amazon and certain South Asian rainforests can no longer do it. The government captures and encloses these spaces; the hands of women and children are forced to mine minerals; fear is kept intact through the proliferation of civil war, child soldiers and sexual assault so no one can rise up. Foreign interests and multinational corporations keep money, greed and war flowing. All of this is done to extract minerals like uranium which is used for nuclear power in the west; most urgently, cobalt so that we can power our laptops and cellphones.

Violence is so very present within everyday life, as a visible invisibility. It becomes clear that encapsulated within my phone are the very problems of climate. We don't necessarily see it that way, which means that to work against climate change means working against this type of colonial violence. When we're speaking to soil, we're also speaking to remediating the communities who are experiencing the very same violence as the soil.

SD Increasingly, we need to be able to talk about colonial soils. It's actually quite shocking that there isn't more written about this. And I mean this term in a really literal way, it’s not a metaphor. Like, this is the way it usually works. Europeans discover people farming in a way that looks weird to them, for example by relying on the nutrient cycling of the litter layer in a tropical forest. For a European, the litter layer isn’t soil, so they clear the forest, and farm like they were in a temperate climate. This makes the organic matter in the soil drop, necessitating the addition of synthetic fertiliser to replace the lost nutrient cycling. The fertiliser activates the weed seeds in the soil, necessitating the use of herbicides. The herbicides kill whatever was left of the soil biology that was doing the nutrient cycling. Without living things in the soil to cycle nutrients for free, farmers go into debt buying these chemicals, and in a single short generation the properties of the soil now obligate farmers to participate in neoliberal economic relationships, which are of course neo-colonial relationships. So here, colonialism isn't some historical phase. These people have inherited soils that reproduce colonial social relations at the level of their chemical and biological properties. There’s also a second phase of this, we might add, when liberal democratic technocrats then measure the properties of this soil and declare it infertile, or only good for certain low-value crops. That in turn drives government policy and dis-investment. We could go on. But I really love this term that you introduced, bioculture. That’s really helpful.

VMThat was such an excellent breakdown. Eradicating biocultures in the soil changes the way of life because moving forward becomes possible only through a neoliberal relation to the soil — and then architects have to make structures for these neoliberal spaces, dictated by that economic dependency. Whereas the soil used to be a space of multiplicity — multiple things happening in that space — it changes when the economy enters with a singular strategy and outcome. Instead of farming as a seasonal conversation, it is now purely goal oriented to meet certain standards of the market. You gave such a good example. I do want to return to what was defined as toxic in that soil in Mexico, and the community's relationship to the land.

SD Yes, thank you. In Mexico, to go back to that instance of contested toxicity: this particular community has, for the last century, had the task of figuring out how to farm using all of the raw, untreated sewage from Mexico City. In the early twentieth century, this was a small stream flowing from an urban population of maybe 300,000 people. Now, the city has 22-23 million inhabitants — maybe more — and it's producing 60 cubic metres a second of sewage on average over the course of the year. The toxicity is everything that comes with that sewage, both the pathogens that make you sick, the heavy metals, and the pharmaceuticals. Many of the irrigation canals wouldn't pass a federal drug test for cocaine, so there are recreational drugs; there's also carbamazepine, an anticonvulsant prescribed for psychiatric treatment.

The largest pharmaceutically active compound in the wastewater, by weight, is a diabetes medication called Metformin. Now these communities are growing hybrid corn, rather than traditional varieties — mainly in the aftermath of NAFTA, which, of course, made corn syrup-sweetened beverages in Mexico cheaper than water. This is the same variety of corn which drove the diabetes epidemic, which then produced a population that needed to take the metformin that is now irrigating the corn growing in the region, which itself is probably used for corn syrup and animal feed. So when we think about toxicity in that way, is metformin toxic? If we ask if metformin is toxic, is that even the right question to ask? Is this entire food system toxic? What exactly is killing us here?

Right now the farmers are fighting regulations that tell them they can't farm with this sewage and insist that it needs to be treated. Those regulations are often not set with a full understanding of what is happening in the soil, or what the toxic and non-toxic parts of the sewage are. I've given just one example of Metformin, but the question of what is toxic is actually quite complex. Each and every thing in the sewage has a story, and that story is connected to the entire history of how Mexico City has urbanised in relation to its agricultural periphery.

KOOZ Before we go, can you share what you’re working about at the moment, where can we find you?

SD Well, my newly adopted city of St. Louis has started to do a soil survey for the first time. Until now, there's been no such survey, so now they're just digging holes across the city and discovering wild, wild things. The whole city is a kind of archeological dig, and all of its painful and traumatic history can be found in the soil, in different places. For instance, a fragment of ground that turns out to be the last urban remnant of the great American tallgrass prairie. You can see that because in the soil there is ten feet of black dirt, while around it, the black soil is only three centimetres thick, because it has been urbanised — turned over, built on and excavated, over and over again. This little invisible island of tallgrass prairie soils is still preserved in a forgotten corner of the city, uncelebrated, unloved, and forgotten, beside a Black cemetery where many of the city’s revolutionaries are buried. Also soils in which family histories are now soil profiles; where homes abandoned through poverty are simply pushed into the ground, covered with six inches of fill, and then sold as a new lot. When you dig down — as these soil surveyors have been doing — you find layers of homes that have been pushed down into the basement and which still exist in that profile.

VM That connects to the relationship between memory and architecture, which is something I'm thinking about a lot; how to redefine preservation, since this is a conversation of redefinitions, and how to go beyond its techniques. I'm about to do a project with a friend in Cairo — a highly urbanised space, in which a lot of the traditional building techniques and artefacts are being eradicated. Most of the monuments are owned by government or Western institutions, so people don't actually have access to their own memories; they cannot necessarily interact with their own history. The question there was, what does it mean to preserve? What does it mean to bring thosetechnologies into this space, like photogrammetry or renderings? A majority of environmental technologies also have a huge history in war, and so I'm thinking about those tensions too. What relationships are we forging when almost all of our technologies are born from histories of war? What does it mean to use these tools together with communities? If a monument can't have a life in reality, does it have an afterlife in the commons of the internet? And if so, can we keep telling those stories?

KOOZ We will follow these and many more questions with you. This has been a gorgeous and generous conversation; thank you both so much.

Bios

Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture, evolutionary biology, and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing art and design, soil science, urban geography, and agriculture. He holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the political ecology of soil in the Mexico City–Mezquital Valley hydrological system. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Victoria McKenzie is an academic-activist, educator and artist. Her work focuses on the interconnections and entanglements of Earth where the realms of the individual, collective (human and more-than-human) and systems align. Trained in Research Architecture and Ecology, Victoria currently runs an architectural-research practice called ‘RRA’ Radical Research & Re-storying Agency. Currently, Victoria resides in Amsterdam, Netherlands where she teaches an MA program at Avans’ University’s MIVC St. Joost School of Art and Design for the ‘Ecology Futures’ pathway.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.