Soil stories from a former Wetland

In Brandenburgs former wetland area “Rhinluch”, many structural problems of exploitative human-soil-relations in the Anthropocene become spatially visible. Instead of engendering the health of all living species in the sense of a planetary health principle, the historically grown, dominant human-soil-relations in this area hinder the well-being cohabitation of the species living in, on and above the soil. This practically shows up in drainage history of the endemic peat soils. Although Berlin itself was built on swampy ground, the city continued to exploit the surrounding wetlands. From 1780 onwards the drained peatland soils of the Rhinluch were used to extract peat as an energy source for urban households. When around 100 years later, the more efficient coal replaced peat as an energy source, the soils continued to be drained in order to function as a basis for agricultural use, especially for the intensive cultivation of summer barley and maize. Still to this day, the soils of the Rhinluch are regarded as mere service objects and are continuously destroyed on a large scale.

Our Project was part of the master studio “Kinship Spaces II” by Undine Giseke at the Technical University of Berlin, Department of landscape architecture and open space planning, Summer Term 2022. It critically examines the exploitative human-soil relations manifested spatially in the Rhinluch. The project was based on the idea that a better understanding and interpretations of the state of soils can be achieved with a sensitive, explorative and intimate approach connected to the concept of soil care. Therefore we translated the statuses of the different soils with a mixed-media approach (microscopic recording, sound sampling, tactility methods) to create a story telling (Haraway 2016) and give a voice to those who cannot speak and are in need of a human ally as an interpreter of their needs. Soil care in this case means to build up relationships to the manifold species that constitute soil, the so-called soil community, as well as to speculate about the needs of the degraded soils and understand their demands. Identifying these needs of the local soils and learning the already existing practices of soil care were starting points to assess and refigurate the soil-human relationship. While the video tells the story of three soil characters and gives intimate insights into their statuses and care needs, our mapping functions as a tool to spatialize information about the local actors and partnered places they are linked to. Here, one can find the Urban Prisoner, who has become invisible under a layer of asphalt that suppresses and almost crushes her. Or the Lush Adolescent, eating and absorbing everything that is deposited through her skin, and who is a bearer of hope for new generations of life forms.