’Sounding the Underworld’ engages with the invertebrates and microorganisms that inhabit the world under our feet, a world that we take for granted, abuse and generally know very little about.
Interweaving an installation, citizen science workshops focused on local soils and a pilot study, the project will make audible the creatures that metabolize leaves, wood, grass and other carbon sources to create a healthy soil matrix, and forges a path towards understanding soil health.
Cross-border/international
France
Other
United Kingdom
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Lot et Garonne, Nottinghamshire
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual in partnership with other persons
First name: Katja Last name: Lehmann Gender: Prefer not to say Nationality: Germany Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Sainte Colombe de Villeneuve Town: Sainte Colombe de Villeneuve Postal code: 47300 Country: France Direct Tel:+33 7 66 87 02 22 E-mail:artbiodiversityclimate@gmail.com Website:http://www.katjalehmann.com
First name: Katrine Last name: Ugelstad Spilling Gender: Female Nationality: Norway Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Herman Foss’ gate 20B Town: Oslo Postal code: 0171 Country: France Direct Tel:+33 7 66 87 02 22 E-mail:katrine.u.spilling@gmail.com Website:http://www.katrinespilling.com
'Sounding the Underworld' , conceived by Norwegian artist Katrine Spilling and German microbiologist Katja Lehmann, is an initiative that combines the visual and sound arts with scientific and citizen science components to explore the state of soils in a local context. Soils are vital for all life on earth. Their function can be compared to that of a gut, where leaf litter, animal remains, wood and other organic matter as well as inorganic substances are all metabolized and turned into nutrients that can be taken up by all life or sent to storage to be released at a later time. Soils hold more carbon than plant matter, regulate the water cycle and drive biogeochemical cycling. We rely on soils to produce our food, yet the UN has declared that a third of agricultural soils count as degraded, owing to lack of knowledge and extractive attitudes. We need to learn how to keep soils healthy, to restore them and to develop cost-effective methods that empower people to understand when a soil is healthy, and when it is not. 'Sounding the Underworld’ will contribute to this need by focusing on the sound that soil dwellers make when they metabolize organic matter, or simply just move about in the soil matrix. Focusing on the Lot in France, a region that is famous for its fruit and truffle production, and is already experiencing climate change-induced rises to weather patterns, the project will interweave three educational activities, a ‘Soil Sanatorium’, where visitors can look at different types of soils and listen to the sounds they produce, public workshops, where people will be able to assemble their own microphones to listen to their environment, and a pilot study recording sounds produced by soils amended with Biochar and soils without Biochar. The project will then travel to Nottingham to form part of the outreach of the Biochar Demonstrator, a BBSRC-funded research project investigating the effects of Biochar amendment to agricultural soils.
Local Soil Health
Community engagement
Biodiversity
Citizen Science
Sustainable Agriculture
The project aligns with a number of the UN sustainable development goals, most notably food security (development of methods to assess soil health), skills development for sustainable lifestyles (empowering citizens to assess local soils), innovation/ resilience in the agricultural industries (low cost methods to assess soil health/improve resilience), sustainable consumption/production patterns (focussing on soil health rather than extractive agriculture, such as over fertilizing), climate change mitigation (raising awareness of soil carbon capture opportunities), promoting and restoring sustainable use of ecosystems (enabling sustainable use of soil). As an initiative led by an environmental scientist and an independent artist, we are keen to practice what we preach. Lifecycle thinking informs what materials are sourced for the microphones and other materials, ensuring they have been produced in as sustainable a way as possible, as well as being durable and safe to recycle after use. Local products/producers will be favoured. We are avoiding the use of toxic glues or materials that could contaminate soil or people. Soils are sampled, stored and displayed with a focus on minimizing the impact on soil dwellers and keeping soil conditions intact. The sound archive from the pilot study, accessible to the wider public, will be hosted by a green server. All design aspects of the project are portable and reusable. If travel needs to be undertaken, the most carbon-friendly way will be sought, whilst ensuring that the project convenors are paid appropriate fees and can afford the costs that these forms of travel require. The project is exemplary in this context, aligning daily project practice to the promoted sustainability goals. As a small team that is not profit-orientated and develops its sustainable practice from scratch, we are not burdened by existing organizational systems geared towards competing priorities or complex and hence slow to adjust to sustainable goals.
‘Sounding the Underworld’ connects lifeforms through intimate experiences with life. The listening experience makes the sound of life in soil accessible to the human sound spectrum. The act of listening to life underground invites participants to become intimate with a variation of lifeforms, drawing listeners into a contemplative space of the interconnected human/soil life relationship. The project activates the capacity to value and care for the human/non-human life relationship. The listening experience takes the form of a ‘Soil Sanatorium’, a space for healing, learning, and listening. The physical design will draw inspiration from a variety of care practices and environments. The set up will come to life through a calm palette in natural materials such as birch, cotton, and linen. The different soils will have individual ‘box homes’, each lined with waxed cloth to retain moisture. Semi-transparent linen will be used as a gentle non-solid boundary containing the ‘Soil Sanatorium’ experience. Our workshops will invite participants to engage with hands-on learning, building personalized listening tools around a large table, where participants connect inwards through outward material engagements, exploring creativity while learning skills. The material intimacy, at the heart of the workshop, emphasizes exploration and curiosity. The process of making builds confidence and memories while also reflecting participants' individuality in giving the microphone a personalized house.The participants' individual creations help them to listen to the soundscapes hidden in the world surrounding them, fostering community and connection to the external world. The project is exemplary because it combines scientific insights with an artistic delivery that allows people to learn about their environment through touch, smell, sound and sight while connecting their experiences with facts and with the emotions of experiencing soil in this multisensorial way.
‘Sounding the Underworld’ has inclusion at its core. The empowerment of different groups of local stakeholders to engage in an informed way with the state of their local environment is a step towards a grassroots democratization of understanding local environmental needs. It allows citizens to connect with and take responsibility for the well-being of their immediate environment. This also creates joint interests between different groups, fostering inclusion. The workshops and installation, which will disseminate the results from the pilot study as well, are designed to either be visited in place, or travel to the visitors (e.g. public markets/schools/farms). Guidance will be sought from local stakeholders (agricultural organizations, town councils, civil society organizations) to arrange visits to groups of stakeholders that are hard to reach with environmental issues. The low-cost environmental microphone and amplifier, that can be employed in gardens, fields and public parks alike, by gardeners, farmers or interested members of the public, empowers non-specialists to think about the health of their local soil from a new and creative perspective. Guidance for the assembly process will be pictorial to overcome language barriers. A spoken tutorial will be available to aid members of the public who are visually impaired. Scientific content will be presented via visual and sound art, thereby dealing with science concepts from a fresh perspective. As we engage with more and more stakeholders, these will be invited to co-design teaching and communication processes to help target specific groups of citizens. We feel our initiative can be exemplary in terms of inclusion, as we address inclusion on several layers: 1) affordability of the learning elements (free) and tools (low-cost), secondly, 2) co-design of inclusionary elements by local groups and individuals, 3) easing access by designing a traveling project and 4) democratizing the scientific research process.
Citizens will, in the majority, get involved in the project either by visiting the ‘Soil Sanatorium’ installation or by taking part in a microphone building workshop. They will benefit from a) listening to the different soil samples, and putting the sounds in context with the soil information they are given at the same time, b) engaging with the general soil health and degradation information they are presented with, both at the workshop, and at the installation, c) being able to take home a tool (the microphone) at material cost price that they can use to further investigate their environment, d)the process of understanding how a healthy soil differs from a degraded soil in their locality.
In the longer term, citizens will benefit from the initiative because learning about developing local citizen science approaches to understand their local soils will have transferable skill sets that can be applied to other local environmental questions, or aid in seeing connections between different parts of the environment (such as soil health and plant growth).
Citizens can help shape/ have an impact on the initiative, through 1) advisory roles on how to include different citizen groups in their locality, 2) direct co-design feedback in response to the workshops, 3) collecting their own sound recordings of local soils, 4) widening the aims of the initiative by re-defining how they want to use their soil microphones. Citizen involvement will allow us as project convenors to pluck gaps in our outreach practice, and to enhance the teaching and teaching materials. The feedback from stakeholders, which we will gain both through targeted feedback requests, and through the teaching engagement during the workshops, will inform which direction the project or future projects need to take to be effective and engaging to a diverse range of people.
Sounding the Underworld was developed during the ‘Boundary Project’, a multi-disciplinary initiative that brought together a group of citizens (diverse in age, profession, nationality, gender) from the global north and south to develop utopian visions of human life constraining itself to live within planetary boundaries. During a series of workshops and a symposium, discussions about planetary boundaries led to a set of co-designed utopian plans. In a second stage of the project, visual artists were paired with scientists to design artworks based on the previous thought processes, and these were exhibited to the public in November 2022. The current iteration of Sounding the Underworld has evolved from the learning process and feedback of the pilot version that was presented at the exhibition. For the coming iteration of the project, we will engage regional stakeholders in the Lot et Garonne to help make the project relevant to local citizens. Once workshops and soil installation have taken part, we will aim to identify local stakeholders who are willing to carry on a version of the project that is relevant to their lives.
The project has received direct input from the environmental science knowledge field (Katja Lehmann), covering microbiology, soil and pollution science, from the visual arts (Katrine Spilling/installation & design, Katja Lehmann/ photography) and from sound art (Katrine Spilling with advice from several sound artists). For the first phase of the project we have made contact with the sound artists Signe Lidén and Jez Riley French to take their advice, as well as using equipment designed by them, and designs by media artist Zac Poff. Pending further funding, we will do so again. The project was and is being conceived in collaborative meetings online and in person, and via email exchanges. We co-design each aspect of it, supplying knowledge and objects from our respective fields as we go along. We are both engaging with the other's specialist skills, adding new facets to our art and science practice respectively as we work together. We both feel that this process is adding value to the project in the form of truly co-designed exhibits and events, where the expression of content encapsulates both our perspectives, whilst delivering visual aesthetics and scientific information of a high quality.
The initiative is innovative for several reasons. Soil health is often understood in terms of the nutrient and organic matter content that a given soil contains, focussing on the needs of agricultural crops. Soil microbiome research offers a more holistic approach, but there is not yet sufficient data to understand a soil's health by its microbiome. Likewise, soil invertebrate diversity is deemed a measure of soil health, but there are so many different types of soil that the term ‘diversity’ is hard to define for any given type of soil. What counts as diverse in one type of soil could be a lack of diversity in others, and we also need to have an understanding about major players in each soil. There has been a trend to involve citizen scientists in scientific research, but many initiatives divorce the data analysis process from the citizen scientist element, making it hard for them to feel included. It has been estimated that 54% of the global population live disconnected from the natural environment (McEwan et al. 2017). Soils projects, in particular, often fail to inspire members of the public to get engaged (Rossiter et al. 2015) possibly because of the seeming lack of ”attractiveness” of soil and of potential participants’ background knowledge. The need for fieldwork/labwork is also seen as a significant barrier. Of the 55 citizen science soil initiatives recently reviewed (Pino et al. 2022), none works towards developing methods that could reduce scientists’ involvement or allow citizens to co-design soil research. A Swiss initiative to listen to soils is limited by costly sound systems which can only be deployed in Switzerland. As far as we are aware, our project, which develops cost-effective soil assessment methods that can be assembled in easy steps to empower citizens to understand their local soils more intuitively by accessing a compendium of soil sounds, and which is easy to transfer from one locality to the next, is unique.
All technical and methodological processes of the project will be transferable. Teaching materials, microphone assembly and usage instructions as well as a sound archive will be placed online, available to those who have access to the internet. The teaching workshops as a whole, as well as the soil installation can travel within the Lot et Garonne department to schools, farms and local markets or specific events, making sure that soils displayed are local. The biochar pilot study can also be replicated, for instance by local farmers,as biochar is widely available. All three elements of the project can be replicated also internationally, in the way we are already planning to replicate it in collaboration with the Biochar Demonstrator at the University of Nottingham.
At the core of our project is the idea that science and art should be interwoven to deliver methods that are as successful in changing the world of matter as they are in changing human attitudes towards planetary boundaries. Co-lead by a soil scientist, and backed by the Biochar Demonstrator, a major current soil research initiative in Europe, to ensure that it is scientifically correct, the project incorporates cutting-edge research. We employ artistic visualization and sound art methods to create different forms of engagement (manual, sight, sound, smell) that stimulate the conscious and the subconscious mind to help citizens connect with a complex subject matter that is of great importance to global well-being. The project is based on co-design principles, firstly between the convenors and advisors, secondly between the convenors and local stakeholders. We will deliver the different parts of the project by heeding scientific principles, and incorporating artistic values at the core in order to create engaging installations and workshops that teach reliable facts whilst inspiring local self-governance and exploration of the local environment. Where the content of the project needs to acquire form, most notably for the soil display (which we call the ‘Soil Sanatorium’) and the microphone assembly, we employ life-cycle thinking to sustainably source materials. The investigated soils are treated with the well-being of the creatures in mind that are being studied, and will be displayed and researched in a way that ensures their safety. Soils will be kept in their place of origin.
The project addresses the global challenges of climate change, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, food security and the problems that accompany those challenges, as well as the need to take responsibility for the extractive methods and attitudes that have created the challenges. By reconnecting citizens with their local soils, acquainting them with the local soil dwellers and the sounds they make and offering a method to assess local soil biodiversity in this way, the project contributes to creating local solutions. Citizens who feel connected to their local soils, have knowledge about keeping soils healthy and understand how to assess the state of their local soil will feel more empowered to protect their soils and thereby contribute to solving a global challenge with local interventions.
We have piloted the project in autumn 2022 when we received a grant to participate in the Boundary Project, convened by the University of Oxford and the Berlin Akademie der Künste. Our output was a soil sound installation at the group exhibition ‘Living within a bounded world’ with a prototype sound set-up. As a result, we have decided to give the project a home on a farm in the Lot et Garonne which has agreed to host both the biochar pilot study and the initial soil sound installation. We have subsequently forged a partnership with the Biochar Demonstrator, which will support the project by supplying biochar and integrating the sound installation and microphone workshops into their outreach programme. During the next year we envisage the following steps: 1) Consultations with sound artists about the best microphone/amplifier set-up and sourcing of materials for microphone building (February-April 23). 2) Assembly of prototype II and testing in soil (April-May 23)/ collation of installation instructions. 3) Contacting local soil initiatives, farmers, markets, citizen groups etc in the Lot and set-up of dates for workshops (April-July 23). 4) Assembly of further sound systems for biochar pilot study and set-up of study (June/July 23). 5) Collation of workshop info materials, building of soil containers for the visual display and teaching plan (June-September 23). 6) Opening of soil installation and workshop phase, end of pilot study (September - November 23). 7) Assessment of soil sound samples from pilot study and preparation to replicate the project as part of the Biochar Demonstrator outreach (November 23 to February 24).
'Sounding the Unerworld' has the potential to contribute to developing new competences, in as much as it initiates method-development for a new holistic system to assess local soil health and invites members of the public to learn skills that will contribute towards that system.
