 Please, everyone, come in and have a seat. That's so much. My name is Lucia Elias, I'm the director of the Buell Center. Welcome to the fourth in our series of Conversations on Architecture and Land in the Americas. Renamed Conversations on Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas. So make sure you expand our geografical lines. It's the first one of this semester. It's the first one in person as well as remote. So welcome and thank you for making this space sort of be alive again. The next one is next week at this time, also lunch. So keep track of that. Make sure you can attend. I'll just say a few words about our theme, which is architecture and land in the Americas. It's been the subject not only of this ongoing research, ongoing public series of conversations, but also an ongoing research project with graduates and postgraduate scholars at the Buell. And it's motivated essentially by one assumption. We've noticed that one of the assumptions that underlies how building culture is described in the Anglo-American context. But just generally in architectural discourse today, one of the assumptions motivated this mostly is that land precedes architecture. That land is something that comes before building. And there are many reasons for this, of course. And I won't get into them now. But our research project and also this series of conversations is aimed directly against this assumption. Our hypothesis is that land is not something that comes before building, but rather that buildings participate in the setting of expectations, in the crystallization of economic relations, of material relations that allow land to come into being as such in the West as an asset, something to be settled, something to be objectified, et cetera. So there's no better place to find evidence for this counterclaim than the soil beneath our feet. It's not our literal feet, although a few floors down past the French Mes-en-Coses. There's about 100-foot-thick layer, ubiquitous, of soil, which is also a material record of about 200 years' worth of relations between social ecologies and the built environment and the natural environment. So this is what we are going to look at and discuss today. And we've brought a very exciting interdisciplinary group of people to discuss it. But before I turn the floor over to Cassie to sort of host this, I just wanted to do justice to the architectural legacy, let's say. There's a long history of architects being fascinated with what they call the soil and what they call geology, the sort of organicist theories of architectural form, which we are still dealing with today. We're motivated by people like to take an obvious example, Jean-Emmanuel Le Vieux-Le-Le-Duc or John Ruskin, you can choose your favorite 19th century or unfavorite 19th century organist spirits, who thought that there were lessons to be drawn from the soil, from what they call the soil. And of course the lessons are always drawn very geometrically, very regularly, prismaticly, tectonically. And so of course these are easy for us to critique and to see the kind of naiveté of their deep desire to draw monolithic architectural lessons into kind of monumental level land. But I'm showing you these images in part because although we no longer have inherited hopefully the organist's social assumptions that they make, still the desire for architecture to treat soil as just a thing, to treat soil as like a homogeneous substance is there. So even today, when we know that it's not geometry that motivates the soil, it's depletion that shapes the earth. We know that it's not natural history but it's sort of soil chemistry that is kind of everywhere on everybody's syllabus in architecture schools these days. We know that it's digging and filling that are providing the kind of suggestive gesture that all these architects designing land-form buildings are looking to. Still we are not immune from this desire to treat soil as a thing, an object, not as a set of, and a record of social relations. So this conversation I'm very happy to say is aimed to re-educate us. And to complicate this view, and for this, I have my co-conspirator is Cassie Fennell, a colleague friend and a long time or I guess important board member for the Bureau. So Cassie had asked to kind of help me put together this conversation. I'm gonna hand it over to her but first I have to introduce you. You don't have to. I hope not. Cassie's right here. Cassie is an urban anthropologist. Her work examines how the social material legacies of 20th century urbanism and shaped the politics of social difference. And of collective obligation and of belonging and of desire, if I can say that. Her first book was called Last Project Standing. It's a fantastic book. It won a prize, the book prize with the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology and her writing combines classic anthropology and ethnographic study but also readings of anthropological theory. And she's especially interested and this is what has come out in the conversation that we've had that I found so fascinating. She's especially interested in the way that sensory and effective qualities of everyday life cultivate people's attachment to places. And so although it's a very, let's say sociologically anthropologically sophisticated theory, it often has very sophisticated theories of the built environment as well. So, Cassie, please take it away. I'm going to remove myself and this chair from the Zoom view. Please help me. Welcome, Cassie. So I thank you, Luchia, for inviting me to the panel and I also want to thank Jordan and Jacob who managed to pull off everything perfectly. Everything they touched has turned simple. So, I feel really lucky to be in their orbit. And I also want to thank the panelists for coming to this conversation and engaging to talk to everyone about their work which I'm really excited about. So I have to confess that when Luchia asked me to think about pulling together and moderating a panel last spring on the theme of land, I thought, you have the wrong person. Do you have the wrong person? I'm an anthropologist of housing. I think about the anthropology of the house and I work in the late industrial US Midwest where I've been used to taking the ground like my interlocutors for granted, right? Is something that people build houses on for me, right? A straightforward national support on which humans raise all manner of homes or households and through those structures, all manner of binding social, political and economic borders, right? And values, right? So it's really the classic kind of household study rendering of the ground. And yet that vision is short-sighted, if not utterly a historical, right? And it is increasingly impossible to hold onto for reasons that are intellectual and practical, right? The two reasons, right? So the intellectual reasons people are probably quite familiar with them over the past two to three decades social theorists in the American Academy and beyond have engaged in this long project to refuse the ways of understanding the world that we inhabit, right? And specifically to refuse the ways that's been, you know divided into two broad realms. The first that should be familiar with the realm of human knowledge, intention, agency and the second would be the realm of matter upon which humans exercise that agency attention experimentation, right? So we've seen this paradigm shifting work within social theory and that has asked us to re-examine various ontological divides that we subscribe to but also, and this is just as important the risks and the injustices of clinging to those ontologies. But I think there's also a very practical reason for us to refuse a vision that would treat the ground as just another vehicle for human desire value agency. And that would be simply for the reason that people are preoccupied with it in their everyday lives, right? So practitioners like people in this room and the people you will become are on the Zoom but also just regular everyday people are preoccupied with the ground, right? They always are, right? People want to know what is in it. They want to know what kinds of plans or other biotic forms that could support or support better. They want to know whether or not or when just increasingly when it's going to flood or dip or quake or sink or explode, right? And if and really when that happens what such a natural disaster is going to cost, right? And who was going to pay for it, right? In short, as much as people take the ground for granted we also really don't pay it for granted, right? So none of these are new questions, right? For instance, you don't get the rise of and the wealth of a city like Amsterdam or the reach of it or even for that matter the reach and the rise of the place we now call New Amsterdam without lots of people spending time thinking and working the ground, right? Looking at the soil, asking what it is filling it in, amending it, right? Appropriating it, telling certain stories and not others about that appropriation, right? We stand on that history very much and that history has not receded below the surface. And yet questions of the ground, its past and its futures feel newly sharp right now. Perhaps I didn't realize that soil is on the civil life. That's really interesting. It's on your civil life, right? It's actually interesting too. And maybe there are reasons for that, right? It seems that there are possibly two possibilities that make that feel urgent, right? First, humans are staring down the possibility that our past and ongoing actions may have radically altered the capacity for vital forms including those that in here in the ground itself to thrive, right? And second, right? It's possible that we're staring down the possibility that those effects of those alterations have been uneasily and unfairly distributed, right? So this is perhaps why we're getting a conversation. I don't know. I'd be interested to hear what you think about it. I will just say that, you know, I'm a little disingenuous. I come to this question because my interlocutors are preoccupied with the vacant blocks that they acquire or occupy or seize. And this is in places like the late industrial in the West and Chicago and the West side of Chicago, it's not specific to Chicago, right? And these high demolition areas which there have been decades of demolition that we have to understand as an effect of racism, right? The general policy was simply to fold the building. It's not allowed anymore, but it still happens to fold the building into the foundation and then cover it up. And so what you get is kind of this concave surfaces and you see this in Chicago, you see this in Detroit, you see this in Cleveland, you see this in St. Louis, you see this in Philadelphia where I'm from, right? And people engage in this space, right? Some of my interlocutors like to think of these residential lots as the priority and there's a reason for that, right? They have these lush kind of overgrowth. They have these brilliant wildflowers and these waving grasses and it feels like reading the Burnham plan, right? You're like, oh, wow, I don't mind, right? Except, right, this is not the little house on the prairie, right? It is also the case that as people spend time in these spaces, they do notice that various things will emerge, right? And that can be everything from marbles and bottles to slag, right? To appliances, to paint chips, right? And so they, you know, ask what should I make of and with my vacant lot, that is the house under foot. What should we make of it with this? I have to say, I don't know the answer to that. But if I were going to craft an answer, I'd want the people like this table to help me understand. And so that is why they are here to help us understand these matters, right? That again, exceed the spaces in which I work and seem to, you know, permeate a lot of our imaginations right now. So I'll introduce them, right? Linda is coming to us as a design principal for JGMA where she has worked on everything from community-driven spaces and installations to civic institutions and universities, right? That's how we met talking about these things. She has also practiced in Guadalajara and in Chicago and she has a special interest in creating democratic spaces that attend to the intersectionality of feminism and racism. She holds many degrees in architecture and project management at Tecte Montevay and Northwestern University and honorary doctorate from Columbia College in Chicago, right? But we should give you one too, right? I'll take it home, all right? Seth Dawson is joining us. He's an assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in Pinkwood. He's a researcher and designer trained in landscape architecture and human geography. And the work is multi-disciplinary in nature, addresses art and design, soil science, urban geography in a very lovely and beautiful seamless way. And you have been the recipient of an SLM Foundation Research Prize, which I'm going to give you, right? And also the Princeton Fellowship in Architecture, Urbanism and Humanities, which is a big deal, right? In the world of academic architecture. And you are currently working on finishing a book called Thinking Through Soil for Harvard Design Press and I'm really very excited to read it. And so finally we have Vanessa Agar-Jones, my colleague who is an assistant professor of anthropology here at Columbia University, where she also has these firm feet planted in the Department of African-American and Diaspora Studies, Institute for Study of Sexuality and Gender and the Center for Science and Society. And this is why you're going on lead next term. That's right. That's right. So that is most expensive. Vanessa's work, Ask How Coloniality is made and rendered material, right? In social forms and human and non-human bodies and in the landscapes that we have in parody through coloniality. So with a focus on Black life in the Atlantic world, she conducts historical and ethnographic research on racialization, environmental degradation and the politics of gender sexuality. And she's also the chair of the Board of Directors of Land to Learn, which is the Hudson Valley-based organization that teaches issues around food justice and community wellness through garden-based education. And I hope that all of you can join me in welcoming them coming to this room. Similar to Kasia and Gia, I was like, when Kasia invited me, it's like, are you sure? So I'm a practice architect in Chicago. So most of my work is dedicated to civic and education, as Kasia mentioned. So I'm, Gia-Gia May is a small firm in Chicago. It's the last one, right? We're like a medium firm and we're dedicated mostly to build education and culture and non-for-profit with organizations in the Southwest of Chicago. From there, there has been some like opportunities outside that we are, but that's our focus and that's where we want us to stay. So as Kasia said, the Chicago area and the Southwest of Chicago, there is a lot of vacant land and there's a lot of demolition and there's a lot of segregation that has happened through the years. So when we approach a project as a practicing architect or a psychic, so we have these organizations and there is a range of projects coming in where we have an ownership and all of those things that kind of align when you build a building. So we're like, we're totally out of the theory and then we're like just emerging, like what's the problem? What are the needs of our people or the people that is in the room but as we would have to align with budgets, things like that. So I have like three projects right now. So one is Columbia College, the Student Center. That project I did with my private student cancer but the interesting piece about this one is like it's south of the downtown Chicago. So that project, when we come into it, it was like very interesting having this piece of land. It was like completely empty. There was nothing there when we came in. We're just like a couple of things that we have to demo. But as we start like looking into the site, you never think about what's in the ground. Like that is never the first proposal. Like, okay, have this empty piece of land, what are we gonna do with it? So you engage with the technical engineer and then all of your other ingredients and you start to assign the programming. And then along that way, you start like engaging with the geotechnical engineer. Most of it, I'm the geotechnical engineer is not part of our services. It's part of the owner services. So which in addition takes like another layer into that area, which is like how, like we're interacting with this like consultant that is not under a contract. So how do we talk to them? So the first thing that came about for the Konan College was like there is a tunnel. So 60 feet and all around there is this gigantic tunnel that was built at the beginning of the end of 1800s. They built a series of tunnels for like some infrastructure. They never finished it. So it goes around the whole downtown area. And then in the middle of this thing, in 1991, they were doing some infrastructure projects and then they broke one of the dams near the Chicago River and they filled it, the whole downtown area. So one of the tunnels is that. So then how do you approach then your building when you have this like diagonal tunnel and say if I can show you the maps coming through this thing? Thank you. Okay, so I'm just gonna backtrack it a little bit. So yeah, I'm J.G.M.A. That's what my firm in Chicago. So just a little bit of a history of our firm as I was saying. So we are a rich myth mostly in the Midwest or furiously there is Juan Gabriel wearing just a Coleman architect that founded the firm in 2010. So we have a bunch of awards and accolades but we're very proud of the community work that we've been doing. So we are committed in the civic investment, the challenge of paradigm. And then there is this project are some of the projects that we work in. So most of, so Charter School in Chicago, this is NEIU. So this is a state university in downtown and I'm sorry, it's not downtown it's like a little bit west from downtown. And then this project is with the University of Chicago is some housing for artists. And then the one in the bottom is part of the Invest Southwest which is a program for that the City of Chicago is developing now and vacant lots that we're trying to bring and then kind of finish with the segregation. So there is a couple projects that are intensive. This is where we work. So you can see that we focus mostly on the South and West of Chicago because that's where the Latino community is mostly there. So that's where we're trying to start. So this is what I was talking about the City of Chicago, Columbia College I just have a series of maps. So you can see as many of you know, probably not. In 1871 there was a big fire in the Chicago area that like consumed the downtown area most about. And then you can see sort of like the shading gray that's where the Chicago fire happened and that the magenta dot is where the Columbia College students that they was sitting. This is a tunnel that I was talking to you about. You can see kind of like in the dark lines that's the tunnels that were built in the night. So this is a map from 1902. So we have one of those tunnels going through there. So then we went into the sunburst map and started looking into it. There is a lot of changes in the rate of Chicago that happened. So you can see that this is our love for Columbia had like a lot of houses, residential houses and then there was a theater on the corner. Even the name of the street changed which it took me a while when I was looking for the maps. And then it became, say 1950, it became a parking area. They demo some of the houses. So they started to disappear in some of the original grids. And then now this is our lot. And then some of the infrastructure there. So this is the maps that we have to look as we are developing the project. So where is the water? Where are the gas? How do we attack it? Where is our entrance? Where is the water meter or the gas meter? All of those things. This is the map. And you can see, with my cursor here, that's where the tunnel goes. So just right in the middle in our building. So how do we approach it? So we have to like talk to the geotechnical engineer. We have to set aside like a bunch of budget just to infill because the city of Chicago now hasn't really had to infill those tunnels so then they don't get the floating situation again. And then over here, very interesting, this is from the geothermal report. This is our typical geothermal reports that we received from the buildings. And it's like, you can see like failed deposit, sealed down wood asphalt, miscellaneous material, loose, et cetera, fine sand. And this is like 20 feet below. I love that he didn't own my hand. I do have the other ones that are more like technical, but this is like lovely and how it goes. And then you can see the weather road. You can see some of the clay and what happens. And it's just like, so how do you approach this? So Casey was asking, so how do you approach it? Like, wow, we have the budget. You just like take three feet out, put a slab on top of it and build your building. Your concrete goes around the tunnel and you infill it, but it's just budget situations. So it's how the building ends up being so all built. It was what I was seeing, but in this building, I did not take into consideration much of the soil except for that tunnel. So I worked in a couple of buildings after that, then I came back. So then I went from Nexar to JJ, and I came back to JJ in a couple of years later. And now we're building an innovation center for the University of Illinois at Chicago. It's a smaller building that they call the 21, but it's also interesting. So this building is located outside of the fire area. So you may think, well, extent is not that bad. It is. So this is the, this is the blog in 1917. You can see there's a bunch of houses, residential houses, and typical, typical of Chicago, there's the alley that goes in the back and then the garages are on the alley. So then all the fronts of the houses are clear. And then there is, in the corner of the street, there is an Imperial Brass, and then a Weldon Institute. So very manufacturer-like. The only thing I wanna mention is that you can see the train over there, some of the train tracks, and then Congress that is just the street. Then 1950, there's a bunch of them would happen, parking lots appear, the houses are on. You can see the blog there, it goes demo and then by 1962, everything is gone. This is what happens in Chicago, in case you can talk more about that. But this is 62, this is 1971. This is the last sort of survey that we have. But something interesting that happened is that this door becomes a mall, a city mall. It has a grocery store on the side. And then the only thing that happens is that the expressway or the highway gets built and where Congress is. So it's like a 20 line expressway that goes through from East West in Chicago. So that happens just right next to it. So that means that everything is flattened out and then it got depressed. So we didn't know what we were gonna find in here. Some of the street changed. So we found a bunch of things happening in there. So this is a geotechnical report. And again, you can see the red ones is for the infill that's happening on the site. And what we, so one of the things we found a gas line in the middle of our thing that connects, it's a three feet gas line that connects the two neighborhoods. So we cannot build on top of that. So we have to move the building and all of things. And then I talked to it and it's just a one story building. So we could do like a shallow foundation. But then when I went back to the geotechnical engineer he's like, no way. You can know to that because of the depth of the field. Like all of that is just houses on top of houses. So we couldn't do any of that. So we had to like do deep foundations even in a one story building that has no weight and go all the way to the ground to find like stone. So this is how the building will look. You can see the highway there, so I think. So it used to be a percentage and they were like a typical Chicago bread and that's gone. And then you can see like the mall now it has come like now it's a part of the UIC, the campus there. And you can see UIC campus to the south. We're in the midst of this building. So hopefully it can break around next year. And then the last piece, and I'm sorry if I take it too much, you tell me. It's I, our firm was part of like the production for the biennial for the Chicago Biennial last year. So we had a couple interesting things with them. We were not in charge of the products by any means. So we were just coming to us to help kind of with the permit process and how they can do it. So the first one, and this is on the storm, like how we got connected is soiled up, which is a group from Europe. And then they were trying to do some installations with soil. They were in their minds. They were thinking that they could come over, dig the ground, put it in a kiln and put some bricks on there. And I, yeah, because it's impossible. You cannot do that. This soil is continuous. The west side of Chicago is down there. So there is no way to contact that. And you can see the site, how it's destroyed and how the case was saying about some of the, like the order of remains and some of the foundations that are there. So they, I connected them with a soil person and then they found soil from, they import soil from other places. So they could not use it over here. This is better time, which is another of the installations. So they wanted to build like this 50 feet poles in the air and there's needed a foundation and like, yeah, you're not doing any foundation since the site without any testing of the geotechnical. You need to test the phase one on phase two, whatever all that means. So we had to like improvise and kind of figure out how not to touch the soil, dig around. And this is my kid going around and some of the pieces as they go. But it's, so they have done a fantastic job in that lot. But they have done it all in top of the existing. The pieces there. This is another project that it's for a grader in the wood. It is a very interesting project that they're doing. So they wanted to build a pavilion here for the community in Ingenwood, which is one of the neighborhoods that have been, have had the most disinvestment through the years. It's a neighborhood to the south of Chicago. So they, the city gave them this lot, but they couldn't dig around. So what they did is some cave-ons and they filled it with wood chips. That's how they attacked the soil. Like they don't touch the soil, but this is a manufacturing area. So they just like build like three feet of wood chips. But what does that mean for a pavilion is that our pavilion cannot have anything, any foundation. So yeah, when Chicago, anything. So there was a lot of work that had to be done to like put these pieces out there. I saw a lot of work with the zoning department because they don't want you to do bourbon gardening because of the contamination of the soil. So we had to like do some of the, they already had some of these beds over there. And this is just organizations that would work. So I cannot take any credit for this. I just have them to kind of put it together. And then this is the third project which is under the grid. So again, it's just like this is all that is empty. They have painted some of this, but it's capped with asphalt. So it's going to stay capped forever until somebody wants to do something with it, but they will have to remediate the soil. Yeah, that's it. Thank you. Thanks so much for inviting me here. I'm super thrilled to be a part of this conversation. And what I'm going to do today is to start by showing you one soil that I want to kind of, maybe ask you to help me think through something that maybe we can discuss. And I'm going to sort of start out by explaining a bit about that soil and then kind of go through how we were sort of working through and interpreting that soil through a series of fancy images. So we'll see how it goes. That's the plan. So this is the soil that I want to sort of try to think through with you guys today. This is a farm field. In this image, it's being irrigated by flood irrigation with urban wastewater. And this particular soil has been irrigated with urban wastewater for longer than any other soil in the world. So between like 70 and 100 years. And all of the wastewater that's irrigating that soil comes from here, comes from Mexico City. So all of Mexico City's wastewater, stormwater runoff, industrial runoff, raw sewage goes through a pipe of 60 kilometers and arrives at that field, untreated. Federated at 60 cubic meters in a second, right? And the first place that arrives when it gets to this valley is this kind of verdant green beautiful valley which is also the world's largest sewage reservoir. And for the farmers in this area, in the valley of Mesquital, this wastewater represents a kind of enormous free subsidy. It makes possible they're farming three crops a year. They don't need to buy additional fertilizer. And for these farmers, the wastewater is a kind of miracle. It makes life possible in the Mesquital. And although there are health risks associated with the wastewater, of course, as you know, poverty has its own health risks. And the wastewater has also made this valley a kind of bread basket for Mexico City as well providing stable crops like corn and also a lot of alfalfa, which goes to livestock. And so, but of course, as you can imagine, there's some problems with this, right? So flooding the valley with such a massive quantity of untreated wastewater causes the soils to accumulate heavy metals, pathogens, parasites, surfactants, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals carried in the wastewater, which you can sort of see here in these kind of strangely persistent and eerily white foams that accumulate on irrigation canals. And there's some other like really strange properties of the water as well. So like many of these irrigation canals that you're seeing here as they get smaller and smaller wouldn't pass a federal drug test for cocaine and also contain some of the highest surface water concentrations of the diabetes drug mefremant, which is commonly prescribed in Mexico City. One of these very strange moments in which NAFTA sort of kind of creates the own geophysical conditions for its own existence. And from the government's perspective, the pathogens in the wastewater represent an unacceptable health risk, right? And in 2017, a new sort of billion dollar wastewater treatment plant came online to treat roughly 30% of Mexico City's effluent. That would also be the kind of the 30% that they sent to the farmers, right? So you would think that this is like a moment of celebration, right? Finally, a giant wastewater treatment plant to treat all this contaminated water. And part of our project kind of begins with the fascination with how this actually became a crisis for the Valley. This is an image of a few thousand farmers protesting the wastewater treatment plant physically blocking the entrance, occupying the treatment plant, preventing any of its employees from entering or leaving. And so really from the farmer's perspective, the treatment plant was not actually a triumph of public health at all, but it was rather a kind of tragedy. It would impoverish them, they felt. And also that they had been living and working in these dirty soils for a century. And over many generations, learned the really hard one knowledge of figuring out how to manage these health risks. And by building the treatment plant, the government was sort of disavowing that knowledge. And worse, transforming the delicate soil chemistry of the Valley in ways that the farmers explained, the government did not fully understand what they were doing. So in some sense, our project begins with this question about the soil, like whose version of the soil is correct. Which image of this soil is right, for lack of a better term. And unfortunately, one of the things that we found is the sort of soil taxonomy is actually kind of very little help here. You would think if you wanted to know what a soil is, you would ask soil taxonomy. And it's actually kind of not a great way to go. I mean, in some sense, the vast taxonomic project of surveying the world soils, which works by identifying patterns in the formation of horizons and connecting these patterns to soil properties is what determines the hierarchy of meaning in a soil profile, right? And it's really this kind of beautiful and elaborate collective agreement for how each individual morphological property of a soil profile contributes to the overarching identity of the soil as a thing that we can sort of name and identify. But the problem for us here in the Mesquite Valley is that this system excludes the possibility that these properties might have a human origin. And soil taxonomy sort of historically has been the study and classification of natural soils whose histories are also natural histories. And this means that even if we wanted to strictly follow taxonomic conventions for representing these soils, we would not actually be able to, right? As soils formed in the effluent of 22 million people and the geomorphology of the arid Mexican Altiplano, they have no name whatsoever in the system of soil taxonomy, right? Which does not recognize pharmaceuticals, pathogens or industrial waste as relevant for taxonomic purposes. So if these soils have no name, then this means there's really no system by which we could objectively decide which soil properties matter more than others. And as we've seen, this has like, a lot of consequences in the Mesquite Valley because these properties are in fact relevant to the people who live there. For the farmers, it's the organic matter which defines the identity of the soil, right? For the government, it's the pathogens. And for soil taxonomy, it's neither, right? So again, we could kind of run up against this question of whose image of the soil is more compelling. And so in order to address this question, I wanna kind of introduce a sort of critique of what I might think of as like the concept of agency in a soil and sort of clarify how our research sort of proceeded from this basic political impasse. And to do this, I wanna kind of consider this image which we became kind of obsessed with in our project. We kind of show this image too much. And we're obsessed with it because, so let me first tell you what you're looking. So these are like two 17th century illustrations of a stinging metal in Mexico. And the illustration on the left is from the Codex de la Cruz Beriano. So that's the oldest extant medicinal in the Americas from 1552. It was drawn just 25 years before the illustration on the right by two indigenous authors in Mexico City, not far from the by the Mesquite Valley. And so what's crucial about this image for us is that in some sense, both of these images were drawn for medicinal purposes. Both of these images were drawn in order to show some kind of relationship between the plant and health. But of course, in one image, there's something sort of conspicuously absent, right? Which is the soil, right? Drawn at the base of this plant. And the inclusion of soil and the illustration on the left wasn't accidental in this regard, right? The basic implicit claim is that in order to find this particular plant with this particular medicinal properties, you do have to actually know something about the soil that's growing, right? In the image on the right, we have kind of an image that's become our sort of common sense representation of plants, right? In the West, which is that the soil has been removed from the plant body. And in this particular case, it was done so really in the service of the project of imperial botany in order to extract pharmaceutical knowledge from the Americas, physically de-territorializing both the plant and plant knowledge from the soil. So the omission of soil, which appears to us now as a kind of common sense in the representation of plants is also no accident, I think. And as you've sort of already been discussing here in your series on land in the Americas, it's a kind of omission that's necessary to the fundamental conception of freedom and property that underrow colonization, right? I think this is a conversation you guys have been having. So in this sense, just from this image of Azizi Castile, which is the stinging nettle in Mexico, for us, we can sort of start to see the moment that we lost the ability to understand the soil in the Mexican top. And part of what we've been trying to do in that sort of thinking through soil project is to sort of reassemble an image of the soil that hasn't sort of been irradiated by the concept of nature and its national histories. So in other words, we're sort of interested in seeing social relations in the soil by mapping the living and non-living forces that produce agency out of their intersectionality in soil bodies. And I think intersectionality is kind of an important term for us. Some of our most trusted guides in this work have been feminist materialist critiques of nature from scholars like Karen Barad and Judith Butler and Rosemary Joyce and Katherine Musoff. But then also some of our most trusted guides were Vanessa, whose work we've had very carefully over the course of the week as we were trying to think about how to respond to this project. This was something that was actually critical to the work that we were doing and trying to think about. I think as the parallels between the soil in the Mexican top and the soil in Marcini, maybe if some of you are familiar with the work, you'll be putting those kinds of things together but some really similar problems. And I think for us, what those feminist materialist critiques of nature really helped us think about was the way that one of the problems with trying to arbitrate environmental justice struggles like the one in the Mesquitele is that we always kind of want clear causality. We want accounts that say, this does this, right? But as we've kind of seen, because that's how we hold people accountable, that's actually the tool that we use to hold people accountable, right? But as we've seen in the Mesquitele, sometimes it's not actually that simple. And if agency is produced intersectionally through sort of, as Karen Braden would say, matter in interaction, then what the soil does actually depends, right? So in many ways, we've been trying to do drawings of soil that show what the soil depends on, right? In other words, all the things that produce agency in the soil intersectionally because what soil is or what soil does like produce toxicity or fertility or disease actually depends on other conditions like medical practices in Mexico City or the use of rubber boots by farmers in the Mesquitele or the North American free trade agreements that's producing the diabetes, that's producing the soils with diabetes medication, or even just sort of racist standards of beauty that put mercury-based skin-winding creams in the waste stream that goes to these soils, right? And this all contributes in really meaningful ways to the soil chemistry of the Mesquitele Valley. It's not sort of some kind of anecdotal oddity. It actually makes a lot of difference. And in this sense, we can't think of the soil as simply formed from sort of cations and clay surfaces. We have to think of it as a process of soil formation that are shaped by the bodies and urban life of Mexico City's residents and even generations of its residents. And I'll just give you one more sort of example through our project to map agency in the soils of the Mesquitele. We also sort of discovered that even the simple medical choice between taking the antibiotic sulfomethoxazole or Soprophoxan in Mexico City has profound implications in the soil of the Mesquitele because one of the medications actually has a half-life in this specific soil that is far shorter than the others. So antibiotics that arrive in the wastewater bind to clay surfaces in the soil and remain active until they break down. And these low-level concentrations make excellent conditions for the evolution of antibiotic resistance. So today it's actually quite easy to find bacteria and the soils in the Mesquitele with multi-drug resistance. And most of these bacteria with multi-drug resistance are totally harmless. But of course, the worry is that something less harmless will evolve through the exchange of resistance genes in the soil. And I say, you know, our project just covered this but what I really should say is that we read the work of Christina Siba who's an incredible soil scientist working in the Mesquitele at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. And you know, without these people doing this kind of work, we're totally blind, right? So her work is absolutely fundamental to the project. And you know, our drawings took on a sort of similar archival quality, right? If the soil in the Mesquitele has become a kind of library, a sort of lending library of genes in plasmids, our drawings took on a sort of similar kind of archival quality. Instead of sort of thinking about these drawings as maybe finished or static images, we started to think of each of our soil profiles as itself a kind of repository of information, collecting different processes at different scales, the key sort of agential moments, like the production of disease or antibiotic resistance or wealth or debt, right? Which we don't often think of as a soil property. And you know, crucially trying to show the production of that sort of agential moment in all its contingency, I think is also crucial to the project, right? Because crucially, it's really only at the moment that you can understand what something depends on, that you can begin to imagine an alternative future. And this is sort of the key to our project analysis of the environmental justice struggle in the Mesquitele. In the end, it's not really that one of these perspectives on the soil was right and the other one was wrong. Like, was the government right about the soil or the farmers right about the soil? It was actually more about two completely different inflicting visions for how we would depend or should depend on the soil in different ways in the future, right? And you know, it's kind of an argument about how we should depend on the soil and what the soil should depend on. And those are radically different, those produce radically different futures in the Mesquitele. In other words, you know, two different forms of life that presuppose two different soils, right? Whose agency to produce the basis of these forms of life comes from radically different socio-ecological relationships. So for us, it's been a process of also trying to connect the sort of claims that are being made about what the soil is to their sort of hidden implications for what the future should be. And that's sort of how we started to think about this particular soil, but I'll end it there and we can hopefully talk more. Well, first, a tremendous thank you to the folks at the Beale Center for organizing this conversation, to Cassie for having the vision to bring all of us together and to both Linda and Seth for this incredible work. And so I appreciated listening to both of you and feel a little proud to be going in your wake. And a real gratitude to all of you for coming out in the middle of a beautiful day to sit in the room with us to hear us talk about soil. I took very seriously Cassie's remit that we come to talk about the work that is already underway and not write something new. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the irons that I currently have in the fire, the two book projects kind of on my immediate horizon, one of which has a part called Soil and the other of which could depart from that section on soil to make some other claims and ask some other questions about how soil brings us into a relation toxically and otherwise. So we'll talk about body burdens, which is the first project. And I've been working for what feels like an inordinately long time on this book called Body Burdens, a sense of endurance and colonial design in the French Atlantic. And in it, I reframed the toxicological concept of body burden to account for the accretion of toxicities in Rasmique, which is a French territory in the Caribbean located right between Saint Lucia and Dominica. It's focused on material exposures to an endocrine disrupting chemical called tipon or chloricone in French and on largely immaterial exposures to things like racism, sexism, homo and transphobia. And Body Burdens asked how contemporary debates about sovereignty on the island are articulated through the prism of ideas about bodily porosity and chemical contamination. The book foregrounds Martinique's status as an incorporated French territory to highlight how Islander simultaneous identifications with the Americas where they are located, with the Caribbean where they are also located and with Europe where they are symbolically located generates political subjectivities and formations of desire that cross geographic and symbolic scales. And so decolonial desire in the title functions on two registers here. First is a reflection upon the meaning of decolonization in a context where political sovereignty is not the anticipated nor desired outcome. Sovereignty is not on the table. And second is a lens through which we might understand bitter contest over the etiology of same sex desire and gender transgression in the African diaspora often framed as colonial imposition. And so this is where the soil comes to matter. So in three sections called sand, soil and sediments, I bring this ethnographic and archival research in the conversation with theoretical questions about French coloniality, about archives of same sex desire and gender transgression, about pesticide contamination and the stories of endocrine disrupting chemicals compel us to tell and about the persistence of the material and immaterial afterlives of the plantation. So through my attention to everyday life I argue that body burdens reveal particular vulnerabilities as well as contradictory assemblages of power in mostly race societies. And I argue too that those burdens offer us a site at which we might imagine a redistribution of their effects an embodied site to enact the radical vision of repair. So my focus on sand is about evidence, archives and presence. Soil is about etiology, toxicity and harm and sediments about reshuffling the stuff of the world as it accumulates and settles but also as it is sometimes erupted and refigured. Volcanoes come up quite a lot in this text because like many islands in the region Martinique is born of a volcanic eruption. Barbados is the outlier of the coral island in the archipelago. Sand, soil and sediments have pushed me to embrace Omisha Eke Tensley's challenge that we find new metaphors and that they must be material as a beacon in my own practice. Eke Tensley argues following Frans Vangelo that these kinds of metaphors provide conceptual bridges between the lived and the possible. And so I'm trying to think with her about the materiality of the metaphor of the materiality of sand, soil and sediment and about how they work as metaphors both in Caribbean literatures and in the stories that people are telling about their lives, their histories and their futures. So sand, I'm just gonna talk briefly about sand and briefly about sediment and then talk a little bit more personally about what happens in soil. So sand's two chapters are a scattered archive of same sex desire and gender transgression on the island and building from a long tradition of thinking both the problem and the power of historical evidence for the Caribbean region, being famously called a region with an absence of ruins. I use sand as an analytic to track queer presences in Martinique via what I call empirical ephemera. This section expands upon the stories introduced in an earlier article called What the Sands Remember that I published in GLQ many years back. The first story is of 19th century Sampierre which was that era's Sodom of the Antilles. It was called as such. And it's destruction and a volcanic eruption in 1902. Sampierre was the capital of Martinique until the volcano erupted in 1902. And the second chapter is about 21st century San Dan which is far on the other side of the island as the site of Martinique's most frequented beach. And together these chapters assemble fragments of what could be called queer social worlds from erotic fiction, ethnographic engagement and from the historical record addressing the tensions between visibility and erasure for non-normatively gendered and same sex desiring Martinique. I draw on this section from the vibrant literature Sampierre archives in conversation also with people working to theorize archives of black Atlantic life. Plumbing the meaning of the Creole term ombachae living under the leaf. I attend to agonize questions about evidence making, body counting and queer burdens of proof as they are made manifest both in political contestation and in the island's landscape. I worked to both manifest proof of presence and to critique the demand for it here recognizing the power of historical evidence even as it's quicksandness tied to technologies of visibility enact their own forms of violence. So I'm using sand to try to think through what it means to think same sex desire and its ideology to think gender transgression and its ideology on the island as related to the destruction of Sampierre 1902. When the volcano erupts, spews its magma, does its thing, destroys the city and what you have in its wake are black sand beaches all along the west coast of the island. And I make the argument that the black sand itself calls up an association with the city that once was the Sodom keeps coming back as a presence on the island because of its relationship to the volcanic eruption. People called it, you know, the destruction of the city of sin, essentially. So that is sand. Secondly, the second part of the book is called Soil. I have been meditating for a very long time on M.A. César's invocation of Black life that we are walking compost, hideously promising tender cane and silky cotton. And so in Soil, I'm thinking through emergent narratives about the origins of same sex desire and gender transgression on the island. And one of the new stories that I begin to write about in bodies in the system that, thank you Seth for reading, is bodily exposure to an endocrine disrupting pesticide used on Martin's banana plantations in the late 20th century. And so this is Keyphone or Fluticone and focusing on this Keyphone or Fluticone scandal as it exploded into the public sphere from 2009 to 2019 or so. This section attempts to the ways that queer bodies become the proxy site for best conversations about the long duree of the plantation and contemporary Martinese life. It always comes back to the plantation and its soils and what those mean for Black life on the island. I take readers both to Saint-Marie, the center of the banana producing region and the shell share, the site of the university, where I track not only the movement of the chemical through the island soil and groundwater. So I'm talking to soil scientists on the island and the folks who are trying to make sense of the extent and the depth of the contamination of the soil and groundwater by this particular chemical synthetic chemical. I'm only attending this one synthetic chemical. There are thousands of others to which I could be paying attention but this is the one that I'm trying to work with and through but also the circulation. I'm also trying to track the circulation of stories about queer etiology as they transform into their own forms of toxicity. What kind of toxic tales do people begin to tell about where same sex desire and gender transgression come from? So attending to the material endurance of sites of contamination takes more than 600 years for this fountain to break down naturally in the environment. So this is an enduring site of contamination as well as the immaterial endurance of this heteronormativities. This section investigates the ways that the biological becomes the social and vice versa. I argue for an ethic of toxic apprehension that takes seriously the multiple forms of violence that accumulate in same sex desiring and gender transgressing martinine bodies. And I argue that these same people and their bodies bear a double burden versus a site for the accumulation of material and immaterial violence and two is proxy bodies that stand in for a host of agonized debates about enduring coloniality. And that's sort of the site of a particular genre of representational burden. So Kimberly Bain reminds us that blackness and soil are mutual geographies of material and metaphoric extraction. And as Cesar II observed, our imbrication of the commodity world of the plantation has made the materiality of soil and our lives far more than metaphor. I'll say more about that in a moment. And finally, the last part of the book is called Sediments. Alex Sr. got gardening in the tropics as a beacon from the illness, gardening in the tropics. You never know what will turn up quite often bones. And finally, Sediments two chapters take on the palimpsestic quality of toxic accumulation, not just in people's bodies but also in the landscape. And I end where I began with a volcanic eruption and with the ways that geologists on the island understand accretion and the insurance of material forms. I find that these geologists write about sediments in ways not too different from humanist narratives about history and about archives. In their work, the stratigraphic layers of sediments and rock tell a story about location and about change over time. Édouard Besson and other of the island's signal thinkers opines that sediment begins first with the landscape in which your drama takes shape, writing that it can be understood as a metaphor for aggregated identities and for an accretive politics that links people to places from which they come. And so sedimented through a particular set of movements of transnational capital, chlorodicone or keypone, this pesticide, joins land and body into a politic of location, one that's not just preoccupied with romantic ideas of national belonging, soil and nation, but it's about bodily material interaction. And looking at sediment, I argue allows us to think almost forensically about the sources and the consequences of human and non-human entanglements in the body. And in my thinking about what the sediment record shows and about the accretive character of this violence, I focus on what accumulates in the spaces through which we move and in the spaces beneath our skin. I think of all this as the stuff of toxic endurance. I can say more about this, but body burdens is a book about evidence, it's about ideology, it's about how we think our future is based on how we understand our past. It's about sand, it's about soil, it's about the sediment record on this island. It's about black folk in all of our differences on the island, sutured together, turned toward each other, but with colonial masters at our backs. As we reach for a language and a vision for what comes in the wake of our undisintangable entanglement with coloniality, with the plantation, I'm with an anti-black world. And so that leads me to a newer project called the Synthetic Atlantic. So the body burdens is all about much to me. So I take some liberty to tell the story of this compound as it moves from the US into the Caribbean. That story is held in the Vance until the newer project, the Synthetic Atlantic, where I take this story of soil and expand upon it following the transatlantic routes via soil contamination of this pesticide. I offer the overlay of Hopewell, Virginia in the 1970s, where this pesticide was most abundantly produced and where there was a massive spill into the James River. With Plinytea mactonique, which is the site on the island where the pesticide has its most abundant distribution, in order to understand one dimension of the plantation's long afterlife and its relationship to what Michelle Murphy has called chemical infrastructures. Those infrastructures, Murphy explains, assemble the spatial and temporal distributions of industrially produced chemicals as they are produced and consumed and as they did some mobile in the atmosphere, settle into landscapes, travel in waterways, meet from commodities are regulated or not by states or monitored by experts or engineered by industries or absorbed by bodies and on and on and on. And for Kepaul and Corticone, its infrastructures unfold on a well-worn path along the routes laid down by the transatlantic slave trade and by the plantation derived commodities of longing at the heart of racial capitalism. In the United States, industrial chemical plants often came online on the former sites, on the sites of former plantations, as was the case in Hopewell, Virginia. Hopewell was called the chemical capital of the South. The place where you see the former factory is also the site of a massive former plantation complex and is now the site of a housing project. Globally, where Corticone came to be distributed, excuse me, the plantation length was even more direct with the insecticide coming to work on the bananas that replaced older investments in sugarcane, as was the case in Russia. So racialized and gendered discourses about toxic exposure unfold across this trans-imperial Atlantic terrain. In Virginia, what you will have seen in the 1970s is that anxieties about reproduction by that concern about the impotence of exposed white workers came to stand in for a measure of the extent and consequences of the damage that this exposure had wrought. And in Martinique, a different set of narratives about the word of reproduction emerged, both about impotence related to prostate cancer, the rates are very high in Martinique, and about the estrogenic effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals, which is part of the core of the soil section of the first project. Claims about the sexual and reproductive consequences of exposure via these soils are at the heart of concerns about chemical afterlives. And these in turn rely upon ideas about a natural body, its optimum health, and its natural gender, sexes, and sexualities. And though Virginias and Martinique soils are linked by corticones infrastructures, they are deeply differentiated by the severity and duration of chemical exposures, the interpretive frames mobilized to understand them, as well as by the possibilities for remediation and repair. And I'd love the ending of your reflections, both of your reflections on this question of remediation and repair. These contexts and their reverberations surface the enduring entanglements of reproductional structures of racial capitalism. Jody Melamed argues that racial capitalism is a technology of anti-use relationality. And in terms of origins and intents, many of the dimensions of corticone story resonates with this analysis. But corticones reach into and across soils in the Americas, reveal one vantage from which racial capitalism is also pro-relational, in that it produces new kinds of largely unexpected kin, among them those of the chemical kind. For me, and this is a concept I've been working with, chemical kin describes the forms of affiliation that emerge and are deployed as this chemical makes its way into persons, places, and things, tracking the articulation of a narrative about contamination, accountability, and communities of chemical injury, inspired by the pesticide circulation in the bodies of people, both powerful and marginalized, both proximate and far-flung. So I'm just trying, I'm trying to think, together this kind of trans-temporally and trans-locally, this community of workers exposed to corticone, as can in many ways, the folks exposed to corticone or corticone, in maximum you get a different moment in a different place. So corticone and its sedimentation in physical and social worlds helps us think in multi-scalar terms about the coordinates for and consequences of our late industrial entanglements ever embedded in their longer-standing relationships, racial capitalism, and the colonial violence. Mystery stitch here is one of Apache phenomena defied as much by the inexorable movement of a chemical from factory to plantation, building to ground, as it is by human and non-human exposures. These scales of toxic apprehension present an opportunity to join up two strains of materialist analysis, I would argue, one that might be considered old by the commodity chain and the other new, with its emphasis on matter and its agencies, the body's interaction with its environments, affect and the sensorium. And this apprehension also presents an ethical demand. The constitution of the toxic in our soil and in our bodies, its diagnosis and attribution has consequences for the past we conceive and for the future as we might hope to inhabit. We'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. It's so wonderful to hear these ideas together and to get a sense of the kind of why each of the geographies that you want us to speak in mind as we keep on top of this session. So I guess I wanted to, I have a number of questions that I thought one that would be really interesting to start with has to do with the kind of skepticism in here, right through all your ideas, this is also a kind of reaching for a different way to capture how soils are used, right? So Linda, you're like, oh, this is a report from, here's the drawing, I love the drawing, right? So I want to talk more about what it is and the movement, you know, the kind of refusal of the kind of traditional ethnographic once like sometimes the interview, the kind of observation and you move between all these sorts of sexual traces, right? All these sorts of literary genres, all these different kinds, all the kind of confessional ways to come to your work. So this is also kind of skepticism to a method that can't capture this object, right? And with that, I see this too, you're kind of, you know, where is the text on it, right? What is the appropriate text on the board? And you have kind of playful engagement with this by drawing with him, but I'm hoping that we can hear from you or just think more about why this kind of object, which is we're learning completely heterogeneous, not captured in kind of a certain kind of classic science model and not even represented in practice in a way that compels you, what, why you reach for, how we reach for these different kinds of representational strategies or methodological strategies to apprehend this object. Why is it important for us understanding how this thing we want to call soil brings us into position? I've just been blabbering too. You get that, I don't, I'm trying to- I just don't like about that drawing and why the drawing is with so much more appealing to you than the kind of technical report. Because it actually like breaks it down into like what it feels like? I don't know if that makes sense. Because the other one is just like very technical, like it's just like just feel whatever that feel means. But the other one has like, there's feel, there's wood, there's pieces, there is, it has some life when you put it like that. I don't know if that makes sense. But when you talk to the engineer and talk about what it's in there, they, the, we have this preconception that engineers would like kind of like very square, kind of like straight, direct. Then when they talk to them, when you talk to a geotechnical engineer or a civil engineer, I was calling my civil engineer yesterday and telling him about, and he was just all excited talking about soil. So if you ever get a civil engineer over here, I'm sure he will be happy to talk hours on how the soil affects and we don't care about it. So when you actually like, the geotechnical report is actually like stack of papers like this that is very technical. But when you get into this drawing, it gets like very simple to like, okay, it's simple. There is 10 feet of fill of like remains of houses and things. And then also when you started looking at the maps, so we didn't look at the maps in the mechanical aspect at the beginning because we didn't care about it. Like it was not in our brains until we discovered that there was a tunnel. So then that's when you started getting into it and understanding what's coming from and what, and then you get the brain or like the passion of what was there and how to attack it. But none of the two projects actually think about what was there in the past. They just like, because they were empty canvases for many years after. So we just sit on them and try to fill them because that's the other thing about Chicago that there's so many vacant lots. It happens in empty for the longest time either in downtown, in the West, the South, everywhere. So the fact that there is something happening on them is a matter of acceleration. It's either in the Columbia or the UIC or even in the biennium ones that are more like, those biennium ones that were very excited because they were like raw fruits. So then when you talk to neighbors and everyone, it's like, what are you doing? So does that have a sport to do with John? Yeah, one of the things I loved about that drawing, the hand-drawn image that I think connects really beautifully to what he said from his team are up to is that it seemed to allow you to exceed the envelope of the site. I mean, I don't know if this is how you think of it when you look at that John, but it seems like it references a larger set of relations beyond the kind of the pink grid of the envelope just for your project. And so there's something kind of abundant and relational about the hand-drawn image that. It is, so where the borings happen, that's the only thing that we decide where the borings go. Like the comments like, where do you want the borings? So then you look them up and then it's like, where are we putting this building? And this is most of the time at the beginning of the projects, you don't know exactly what's gonna be your project. So you start like point-point then. So then you think both there and then just like gets it. And then, so what we're seeing is just this much of actually test of what's happening in there. We do like four. And obviously, if you want a fifth one, it's just like putting in T because it's money involved. Other thing that's always gonna be re-enactment and talking about you guys here again, that I am more interested in soil more and more is that we are trying to do now this, we're trying to be sustainable, trying to save energy, conserve energy and find different ways. So then in Chicago, the most economic and most easy way to get energy is through the soil. So geothermal systems that go 100 feet down the air and then you do this. So basically it's just like a pipe, an inch and a half pipe that goes and then you do like 40 of them and then that's, so you run water through them and that's how you do heating and ventilation. So that's very interesting to understand that even your daily power can come through or like you're not your power but your daily like heating and cooling can come through the air. So there are tests that I need to do and I cannot find an engineer to do it which is very strange. It's what is the energy load of that specific piece of soil of land. So I need an engineer that goes, drills measures how, what's the temperature of the soil down there? And then in that way, I can reduce the amount of drilling that I have to do. I don't know, like that's very, it's super technical, I get it, but it has to with the nanosolder, and so it gives you all these other possibilities, infiltration, water, stormwater, energy, all of that, all the other things. Yeah, and I think that is what's also so important about that also in relationship to this question of representation is to also realize that that drawing of soil that you show is not soil to an economist. Correct. It's land. Or it's maybe some kind of possible future soil after a few thousand years. You mean because if you can't grow anything on it? No, no, because... Because it's actually not soil. Well, first of all, an agronomist would only be interested in the first six feet. Anything under six feet is not relative at all. So all that whole section going down 60 feet, it's not soil, it's what they would call regular, right? But then also it's not soil in the sense that it has no ability to support plant life. Maybe that would also be... But that's just to say that every discipline, I mean, soil is one of these materials that affects so many other disciplines, so many other kinds of things that people want to do, that all of these disciplines have different ways of representing the soil, right? Geotechnical engineers have these, I love these Casa Grande slump tests where they get the soil wet, and then they like... And it's like... And that's a technical measurement. That's how they see, that's how they understand the soil. Like that is literally the state of the art for how we understand plasticity in soil, right? And that test is a representational apparatus, and that apparatus produces a particular kind of knowledge, and that knowledge is completely irrelevant to other disciplines. It's not even in soil what they're doing, it's something else, right? So it's not a question of like getting better or worse representations as soon as you start studying soil, you are in the hall of mirrors of claims about what is soil, what is not soil. I was also struck by the extent to which some things are just, they're the known unknown unknown, there's a lot of interest in the unknowns, right? But in keeping them unknown, right? So I'm wondering if, and I'm wondering what the stakes of that unknowability are, right? So I mean, it's kind of clear to me, oh shoot, if we do a short foundation, a technical term, shadow foundation, and we hit this, we're gonna have to mediate this, it's gonna cost a lot of money, or in reading your work, there's some, I didn't really make sense to which this soil is financialized for our insurance, it's very interesting, that relationship. But I'm wondering like, is there, are you coming across in your work a kind of, there's a kind of negative unknowability here, we assume a kind of negativity that shows up in also in the kind of metaphors that emerge to apprehend this object. So I'm wondering if there is any room for some other way to understand this syndrome, are you coming across, or in pursuing different kinds of representational strategies for in looking for different genres of apprehending the kinds of relations that soil brings us into, that would not be over-determined by these kinds of negative logics of debt, or of remediation, or even of toxicity, right? So, because then it just makes me, everyone touched the ground a lot with this kind of stuff. So from what, especially given the extent to which there's a kind of haptic quality running through a lot of your ideas too, like what is, to be honest, the hands are here and then what exceeds the diagram. So where are these, where is this energy? I don't wanna, this is not an ask for the Polyana rendering of this, right? But this is an ask for why do we, why do we make of this intense, like the negativity of this unknowability, right? That it's been boxed and kept boxed for good reasons, right? The insurance company does not want to pay out or et cetera, or you don't wanna pay to remediate that. It'll cost a little cheaper just to run the deep foundation down. Where, what else is there? And where else is that the excitement that your geotechnical engineer has? Where do we, where else do we see that excitement? And what do you make of that as a different kind of way of engaging this, relational entity? Not, I'm sorry, that was not a question I planned it out. I don't know. Yeah, I, I, I really don't know. Because in my field of work, I depend on so many people. So it's from the university to the state, to the, like all of these people that are, that they, like all of them run in different priorities. Everyone of them has a different priority. So trying these other like own notes into the table that they really don't wanna know. It's really hard. Like it's just not something that they, like, the moment that, so the moment that I create, like it's like, okay, can I get authorized to run this test? Why? And so then you kind of like run through the whole variables of why do you wanna run that test? And then, so then as the moment in, right now in the moment of the project, it's like, okay, I need to run the test because I need to know the energy load of the blades because it will save your money. That's when it's like, yeah, sure, go. But yeah, the fact that I cannot find an engineer to do it is very strange. Like I, and Chicago's not small city, but it means it's like I'm being contacted like any type of a geothermal engineer, like geotechnical engineers to figure this out, found one academic that wants to do the test, but here's one, here's having a machine to drill. So I need to connect the dots. But yeah, I, it's just their norms, depending on who priority, who has the priority or who has the money, the budget or it's where it goes. So I'm assuming it's very similar to what happens in Mexico. Yeah, it's really similar. Yeah, I mean, in Mexico City, I've been really fascinated about how diatoms go. So I think I went absent from the entire concept of what soil was in a geotechnical sense because they're not supposed to be there. And I mean, I mean, I think what this kind of gets at is a little bit about how we can't sort of rely on someone to completely decode soil for us. It actually depends on a set of practices that we build. And those practices are created in particular places and for particular reasons. And they can become quite powerful. I mean, for me, the way in which the farmers in the Mesquitá understood those soils came through generations of care, the labor of care. And even though it's a soil that would totally disgust us, they had their own particular practices for how to know and understand those risks, which were completely invisible to us because when we want to understand the soil, we go to agronomists and geotechnical engineers. So I think it's also really interesting how there's this kind of whole invisible strata of soil care practices that not a lot of people are talking about that aren't easy to find and to know, but always exist. And they're sophisticated and they're kind of knowledge that's also sort of irreplaceable because if you think about how specific soil conditions can be, right? They're sort of non-transferable knowledges. And so there's this kind of really interesting fight between a science of soil that would produce transferable knowledge or universal knowledge that would be applicable everywhere and knowledge that would kind of remain local and irrelevance in other contexts. Can you give us an example of what those practices involved? Yes, in the Mesquitá, yeah. So like, I mean, for a lot of the farmers, like they would only eat lunch in certain places wearing, you know, and that had storage for like rubber boots and things like that. Or they would kind of only do certain things during the time in which they would flood irrigate their fields. When you haven't flood irrigated your field, you can do things that you would not otherwise be able to do in such close proximity to the wastewater. There's all kinds of sort of safety and kind of conscious ways in which you understand, like, okay, so then when you flood your irrigated field, what are the kind of implications of that saturation for when it's time to grow or when it's time to sow seeds and things like that? I mean, there's a lot of ways in which, how you grow something doesn't necessarily come of a manual and to know how to do it in a particular area with a particular system. I mean, also every farmer has a different access to the irrigation channel. And that really matters because actually, the longer the wastewater flows through a canal, the cleaner it gets because it actually does. It's like getting the sediment. That's right. Yeah, the sediment of the irrigation canals is actually cleaning the water. And when you test the water at the beginning of the irrigation system and at the end, it's not the same water. It's completely different. So there's also depends on knowing where you are in the irrigation systems, know how carefully you need to be. Yeah. It strikes me at the castle that your question in a way points to the fact that soil science with the curiosity about the soil, is very unique assumption that soil will generate something either because it's something they grow because it will generate interest and kinships and sudden relations. And that in some ways is derived from the very simplistic definition of the soil as a thing that grows. And even in these very, very distant practices that are no longer about growing anything, that somehow remains the idea that if you dig here, then what you will get is not just a piece of information with some kind of relational matrix out of which other things will grow, whether that's memories, whether that's revolutions, whether that's the wrong kind of project with that associated, et cetera. That there's something about the soil as a kind of matrix for future problems or future something that remains in these forms that are in the station. I mean, I don't know. I'd have to ask that whether he intends, do you intend your drawings to be generative or to be records? I think they're archives. They're archives. And I would like them to be generative in the sense that maybe if we did understand all the things that the soil depends on, we could actually think of an alternative future that's better, maybe for everyone, but certainly better for a certain set of people who want to have that political conversation. But right now, I couldn't get into this in the amount of time that we had, but the heavy metals continue to accumulate. So if they keep farming, if they win, I guess the waste part treatment plant and they keep farming, they've passed that toxic burden on to future generations. That's not great. And if they lose, and the waste part treatment plant prevails, then maybe all of that clean water that Mexico is going to producing is actually going to transform the entire valley into an industrial part, right? And so there's also this other theory that actually water that has less organic matter might actually release the stored heavy metals that are the legacy load of stored heavy metals, right? And then it would really have to be an industrial part because you couldn't grow anything in that kind of toxic soup. So then like, is understanding more about all of these dependencies allow us to imagine a kind of third option? And what would that third option be and what would that third option look like? Should we open it up? Because it looks like there's some pans. Maybe it's going up again. One, two, oh yeah, go ahead. Are you sure? Yeah, thank you for the fantastic presentations. Maybe a few thoughts on the actual question. But what was interesting for me was this connection or this metaphor that was mentioned at the beginning of the breaking ground, right? It's a very strong act within the architecture of this breaking ground. Even if it's already quite broken, we're going to do that. And then also the connection between bodies and buildings or broken bodies, broken buildings to a certain degree. But on one hand, we have this connection within agriculture of the obsession with fertility that led to this infertility in bodies and soil. And then on the other hand, also with buildings, right? With all the kind of materials that go, not only landfill, but also the way in which they are built. We're not more familiar with some cities like in London where all the construction stands or 80% of the construction stands come actually from offshore stretching, right? So you take part of that sediment, that sand, from the ocean, from the Atlantic, that goes into building most of the corporate offices of the city. Right, so you have this again, it's got more broken bodies into more broken buildings and so on and so on. And then also with your thermal energy that I'm not expert, but also this whole set of chemicals that go into the water that circulates underground, that brings more chemicals out of the ground, turning the earth inside out again, like in Gabriel Haynes' train of thought. So I was wondering about this kind of loop of broken bodies, broken buildings, broken agriculture, broken architecture, whether there is a sort of escape from that loop or a third option as you were mentioning before, is there possibility of an outside at all or how do we embrace that kind of vicious loop of sorts? Yeah, I'm sure there's no answer to that. I'm just thinking about the reflection. I mean, I think that's really interesting. I haven't thought about this systematically, but I'm struck by the extent to which there's a dissemination of knowledge, usually from the extension to agricultural extension to gardeners, right? It's fine, right? The only problem is just make sure you go up, right? Make sure you have that mulch, make sure you have a raised bed, right? And then don't worry. Or if you're a little worried, let's try the plants that sequester in the roots, any kind of toxins, right? And yeah, so people do that, right? But and yet people also are committed to not doing that and to breaking the ground. And they will hear this kind of these mantras don't touch, don't eat, you know, that, blah, blah, blah. And they just shrug at it, right? And so this is, I don't, it's not ignorance and it's not desperation. And so is it a third way in the, you know, not in the 1990s kind of welfare reform model, like, you know, is there kind of a, was this kind of active experimentation that is demanded that you've been working with this kind of material for several decades and you know, the water and the soil that you have a way of working around? I mean, that is the only way that I can make sense of it as an anthropologist, that people are actively experimenting with this unknown as opposed to denying its existence sequester, imagining it could be sequestered, right? Because it can't be, or, you know, so it's, but I don't know the nature of that experimentation and whether or not people are comfortable with that, right? To what extent are you comfortable wallowing a bit in the wastewater soil? I mean, but it seems to be that that has to be, that is, that's the only way, you know, through is through a kind of situation. But I don't know. I would agree. I think some of the people I work with have a kind of sobriety about the inability to undo toxicity or toxic touch. So there's a kind of, in the same way that they have a sobriety about the inability to become sovereign, politically sovereign, right? I think Martinique, they look at Haiti and they say, why would we be politically sovereign? What sense does that make, right? There's no, there's no undoing the toxicity of the colonial erasure. There's no undoing the toxicity of the place where we live. There's a kind of the broken bodies and the broken buildings are going to persist. But the question then becomes how, how do we make the best, the best life given the faster the cinderance? Yeah, it seems like, and this is very romanticized of my part. It's like, I was like, there's the hope for something. Like for a third option, like it's hope that has some hope of something that will come up. I think the most important thing is acknowledgement of it. Like, so my first feeling, I didn't know that I just didn't even talk to the deal that we had that. It was just a factual. And now it's getting acknowledged. And now I'm passing this to the future organizations because I think what happens is that we're not used to being on this like, so many years of urban things happen in other parts. Like there was a house there, but now there's like 20 of them. Now we'll have to acknowledge that. I think if there is one or two houses, you could just like show up and then keep going. But now that there's 20, you have to acknowledge. Not just because of the whole thing, it has to do with capitalism and colonialism. It's like, it's going to cost you money, which is sort of like how I get influenced all the time. So how can you start developing ways of that the design of the building actually thinks through what's on the soil and not just ignores it? Because that's the sign. That's how you acknowledge the architecture of the design. Like you need to understand what your conditions are. You talk about the sun and you talk about the energy. And now we talk about how can we make like not dependent on oil, so that we start talking about geothermal. So now we need to understand that the soil is also a factor that we need to talk more and more. That we've been ignoring and just living to the engineers to do it, now it's all part of it. Now you're jealously wanting to take part in it and making part. I think Kasi, you're right there. We have to do what I think of when I think as someone who studied regimes of historicity or regimes of the classic pronouncement is that we are now in a present moment. Nobody has historical curiosity, but not so at all. On the contrary, you're right that there's people are fighting over who gets to be the person who discovers what's actually where soil is actually made of. Not just what it remembers for specific things, but it's a form of historicity. It's a form of temporal curiosity, I think, but just a very materialist version of it, rather than one that's about the archeological imagination or what previous civilizations were there. So you have a question, but you were first, so go for it. Oh, okay. That sounds really interesting for everyone. So I come from a post-colonial perspective and I found the parallels really interesting actually, particularly around the way we approach things theoretically. So the problem that we have with post-colonial studies is that while looking at colonial legacies and trying to understand the impact that that has on producing the kind of post-colonial body, whether that's corporeal or cadastral or chemical, the problem with that excavation many times is the fact that we then constitute and construct and define those bodies simply through the colonial and we end up reproducing that colonial gaze. So the work is still important, but it's also reproductive. And so my question to you guys was, how are you dealing with what seems to be emerging as the built gaze and how you are kind of constructing the soil through all of these built encounters, whether it's the wood chip or whether it's the affluence or whether it's the pesticide or whether it's the demolished houses, how are you then grappling with what's emerging as the built gaze and how can we think about the soil and it's, I guess, intransigent or complicit or mediative capacity that's outside of and not just a part of the way the soil has been colonized? It's the built gaze, actually. I'm not just kidding about the nowhere, I was like, boo! It's a big question. I mean, I don't know. I mean, this is not my wheelhouse, so I don't even know and I don't even think I understand the orders of apprehension that are at play even in the war of different academies of soil science and all those sorts of stuff. I mean, I guess the first question that I would ask would be maybe from a practical standpoint, why would, if these kinds of ways of apprehending any kind of substance, right, doesn't have to necessarily just soil, right, have so structured a geography such that one has to inhabit it, right? And one has to thrive or not within it, right? What would be the practical value of insisting on outside of that or if there is a whole sort of geography in places already nailed down these ways of understanding these places and producing value on them and only asking about the first six inches or whatever it is, right? So I mean, I guess what strikes me about the people that I talk to who guard in any way and what is, you know, I mean, it's fill. There's, you can see like bathtubs and stuff, right? Is that they are just, they are just not looking for an outside per se, right? And I think, I don't know if it's because the substance that I don't really know why, perhaps it's because it's so ubiquitous, this practice that it's hard to imagine any kind of containment and perhaps any other outside to this than the world that we have now and then what to do with this here as opposed to imagine a different kind of game. And yet, you know, I have to say like one of the reasons that I thought a lot about this is because I went to the field, and attempted to do fieldwork with toddler which I thought was going to be swimmingly straightforward. And it was none of those things, right? And it was very interesting to watch this, you know, now she's six, but the time she was two, just engage a landscape that I hadn't think that I had rushed over for years and not thought about, right? You know, I know how to get from A to B because it's all these desire lines, cutting the lots, you go this way and that way. You just, this is the fastest way, right? All these vacant lots. And it was interesting to see what she noticed, right? And what kinds of things she took pleasure in touching and pulling, I mean, in some ways it's a nightmare, but in other ways it's really interesting because it suggests a different way of engaging stuff that is completely unsocialized into the idea that's being something already regimented either by science or by, you know, insurance or by anxiety about, you know, my kid's going to grow a horn or something as she touches it. And I was like, huh, I wonder if that is kind of this like radical vulnerability out of which a different kind of gaze could emerge. I mean, does it need to be an unsocialized small child? I don't know, but it was very interesting to watch and very perplexing, right? To see what she was drawn to and what she wanted to assemble and what she wanted to sort and the kinds of things that she put together of this kind of collection of tile and flag and paint chips. Of course, I took the paint chips away from her. I do know that, right? But that kind of question of sorting because it's such heterogeneous stuff, right? She did love it. She did love it, right? So then the question is like, is that in that sorting, is there something really interesting as a kind of initial practical gesture? Like what is it? If it's not going to be the colonial gaze, it's not going to be the built gaze. Then just like some, the move to sort or to organize is human, right? So what will be the sorting mechanisms put to experiment with what they would be depending on the incoherence of the substance I don't know actually, but it was really inspiring and terrifying at the same time to watch someone start to sort of move through this. But is it just human though? Because I was struck by when he said, how can the different ways in which people think about the soil and how can we understand the soil? But I hate to come from this kind of cliche post-humanist stroke, but are we going to wonder how the soil understands itself? Is there another way that we can come from this? I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's all coming from a very top down place. I mean, yeah, that would take us into a discussion of what we understand, the kind of analytical value of post-human move to be. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to go out on a limb and say something that I haven't sorted through in my head. I guess I always come down, I don't have access to a non-human perspective. And yet what I do have access to is imagining two range of relations that could be possible with the human interpreter at the center of it. I don't know. I mean, that's maybe anthropocentric in some ways, but that is where I come to that. Well, maybe to start with the map of the relations and to understand that, of course there must be interest involved, right? Because if you have a kind of awareness that somehow the microbiome is being affected by these practices or whatever it is, then there will be a kind of interest and kind of top-down interest in understanding this relationality. But I'm not quite sure where else to go as an anthropologist that wouldn't be speculative and speculative is fine. That makes sense. So it has depicted at the drawing, which was not meant to be read as very graphically legible of some kind of agency. And then the way you describe it, you have to talk about it, I guess. We suddenly saw basically a certain kind of not toxicity, actually an immunity to disease developing inside the soil. That's a pretty non-human, I mean, it's human-originated. And it's NAFTA. So you said NAFTA, but then you showed these kind of non-human things developing in the soil. That's pretty close to a human sort of perspective, but yeah, perspective with depiction. Yeah, but I mean, I also want to say that some of the great post-colonial theorists were soil scientists and believed in the power of soil science to transform social relations in post-colonial contexts. And I mean, it doesn't have to be anything more than saying actually this particular soil is like a capitalist soil. This particular soil creates dependence. And this particular soil creates dependence in these kinds of ways. And if we want to decolonize a nation, you would also actually have to start to decolonize the soil. And that might be as simple as thinking about the relationship between soil moisture and tree cover. You know, at a certain threshold of soil moisture, you can grow things and be autonomous. If you fall below that threshold of soil moisture, you cannot. So you could think of even just like simple relationships like that as potentially quite powerful in post-colonial contexts of thinking about what is the soil that's going to produce autonomy instead of bondage or autonomy and self-sufficiency in ways that are new and novel and not based on capitalist relations and in a colonial context. I mean, yeah. So one last question, we have six minutes and then we'll have done a good two hours with you. Great, thank you so much. And so thank you for the question. One of the things that was really interesting to me is the question of agency and kind of this political impasse, right, that where I think in many ways kind of all of the presentations are invoking in one way or another. And I think here it's also at the metaphor also like what the soil grows, where I think how can we also think about how soil is grown and the fact that soil is something as it was mentioned, right, that has a lot of care practices and then very long history of care practices. And in like recent studies, like with David Gerber and when grow, David Monroe with the Don and everything, right, how all of these like early formations of societies came together because they were growing soil that then were then able to grow fertility. And I think this is kind of the work of Pablo Tamales, right, that talks about how in the kind of forest ruin, right, we see the architecture of how the Amazon today, like how this biggest rainforest is constructed, is it constructed in like habitats, is it constructed in ecology that developed like over thousands and thousands of years. And I think especially it says, you know, like, when we find these kind of moments of kind of political impasse, these moments of crisis of like breakdown, how are we, and especially I think like, and Vanessa, you talk about like so beautifully, right, this kind of toxic kin, fact that in many ways what we can see today, like the toxicity and this is very much indebted to the work of Hannah Landecker, right, in the history of like epigenetics and metabolism. The fact that toxicity today is kind of so prevalent is that toxicity is what is kind of growing us. We are moving through toxicity rather than toxicity moving through us. So then it's like if all of you know, there's how are we kind of, or what are the possibilities of kind of flipping the order or kind of going back to kind of another order where kind of these care practices are really kind of being back embedded in order to think and can we through that kind of start thinking about how we build new formations of like actions, of alliances, of kind of political agency, right, to kind of really kind of implant kind of for future generations, kind of a certain soil that will be for that again. It will be very different fertility. It will be kind of full of this kind of post-colonial, post-toxic, post-industrial kind of soil, but it will be built, right. And again, like how do we build the environment once again? You already have any thoughts on how to do that? Woo! Part of your thoughts on how to rebuild a fertile soil like planting it would go well, that's it. I mean, part of what I've been trying to think about and thank you all for your questions is how we might think this future without insisting upon the post, right? Like I think part of what Martinique offers for me is to be able to think through enduring form of plenality that never gets to the post, that never gets to the, and so the way that the synthetic chemical does that for me is it kind of jumps the shark of what its planners think it's gonna do, right? There's this sense of a chemical that can be bounded in place and time. It can have a certain set of causal effects that can do a certain kind of work in the ground that will not then touch everything around it, but of course it does. And that the only way to not even reckon with its effects is to redistribute its effects rather than try to undo them. And I think that for the folks that I work with and the worlds that I think they're trying to build, the only solution is a redistributed one rather than an undoing or remaking one. It is reckoning with what is before us and trying to radically move the burden to diagnose the burden soberly and then to move it in a way that seems kind of more equitable for the worlds that we're trying to be in and to evolve. Yeah. Wonderful. Okay. I think we can make that the last part in comment and I really want to thank the audience and also thank you. So Linda, Vanessa, Seth and Kathy, thank you so much for making this video.