PAPER
with commisioned writings by:
TOMKE BRAUN
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
ZARA JULIUS
ZAYAAN KHAN
MAHRET IFEOMA KUPKA
LINDIWE MNGXITAMA
MAGNUS ELIAS ROSENGARTEN
KATHY-ANN TAN*
Thinking through/with Soil: Reflections on Digging, Composting and Sanctuary
In their single channel video, “Notes on Digging” (2020), the artist Kiyan Williams describes soil or dirt as at once “a metaphor for all the things that once made me ashamed of inhabiting this body” and “the possibility for transformation, regeneration and to become something otherwise.” The video details the process of installing their public artwork, Reaching Towards Warmer Suns (2020) – a group of sculptures of arms and hands formed out of soil that reach toward the sky, that was originally installed along the banks of the Powhatan (James) River in Richmond, Virginia, on the site of the Richmond Slave Trail where some of the first enslaved Black people touched land in what Williams calls “the new/ruined world”.*
The piece was inspired by Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me”, and emerged as a response to Christina Sharpe’s meditations in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being about how to memorialize an event (the afterlives of enslavement) when the latter is still very much ongoing in the present. In the video, Williams describes their urge to dig as simultaneously an act of self-preservation – digging to root out the histories that are embedded in the soil, of colonial violence against enslaved persons and its contemporary manifestations of gendered and racialized violence against Black queer and trans people – and as a labor of love – to uncover, bring to light and tenderly hold the “traces of stolen life [that] were left behind in the soil”. Firmly planting the arm and hand sculptures into the soil is thus both a gesture of marking and acknowledging the site’s history of colonial violence, as well as an act of re-inscribing and re-claiming that space in the present with the lives, stories, poetry, art, breath, joy, hope and thriving of Black people that the artwork symbolizes.
Williams is known for working intimately with soil in their work**, by tasting it, rubbing it and sculpting it. They recall how, the first time they worked with soil as an artistic medium, they knew it was medicine, something that would hold them together, ground them, and keep them rooted. Soil thus became a medium of grounding, healing and transformation for the artist.
Kiyan Williams’ work on/with soil is an interesting point of departure for considering how this seemingly ubiquitous medium offers complex ways for us to reflect on our own relationship with our surroundings, to think about the ways that different bodies and subjectivities are allowed (or not, as the case might be) to occupy and navigate public spaces, and to contemplate how we engage with the traces of histories of colonialism, enslavement, genocide, looting and extraction that are rooted in the land. How, indeed, can we reconcile the notion of soil as memory, archive and vessel that holds the vestiges of forced migration, genocide and land dispossession, with the more affirmative nature of soil as sustenance? How can we hold and bear, not bury, the violent past (and its present-day manifestations) of plantation politics, enslaved and indentured labor, settler colonialism, land dispossession, extraction and racial capitalism together with the possibility for repair and resilience, for decomposting, transformation and the regeneration of new life that soil holds out? How can we grieve, mourn, mark, commemorate, build, repair, re-claim and re-construct, on/with/in soil?
In pondering these questions, I am reminded of Julietta Singh’s work that is attentive to the ways in which ongoing legacies of colonial violence have left indelible effects on our natural and lived environments, and how necessary it is to engage in decolonial practices of what she terms “unthinking mastery”***. In The Nest, Singh’s currently-in-production (at the time of writing) feature-length experimental documentary with filmmaker Chase Joynt, she returns to her childhood home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to re-discover the house as a hub for intersecting histories of anticolonial feminist struggle and interracial alliances – from the life and times of Annie Bannatyne, the Métis matriarch who built the house in the 19th century and was a central figure of the anti-colonial resistance movement in Canada, to the stories of the current occupant of the house, Christine Common-Singh (Julietta Singh’s mother), who was once famous for her eco-feminist activism in Winnipeg.
The documentary raises the question of how bodies that occupy architectures become part of their legacy and, conversely, how we might understand ourselves as co-inhabiting the histories of spaces and architectures that have their own story to tell.
How can we develop a practice of deep listening in order to hear the tale that the architecture of a place wants to tell, calling back to life its previous manifestations like ghostly palimpsests? What kinds of physical and emotional labor are involved in situating oneself in a place in order to receive, transcribe and render its story, hence entering into a contract of relationality with history and its discontents? As Dionne Brand famously writes in in A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001), “One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that history.”
Ruminating these thoughts, I am reminded of a section from Dionne Brand’s long poem, “Land to Light On”, in which the speaker describes her experience of living in an unfamiliar country as one that leaves her feeling dislocated, misplaced, in exile, at sea without the promise of arrival:
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What happens to histories and stories that can only be told by not telling, that must be told in their un-telling?**** To the histories of racism, genocide, forced migration, deracination, colonial violence, extraction and exploitation that have indelibly left their mark on the land? How do we respond to the legacies of these entangled histories that have not only become sediments in the bedrock of the soil, but are also still clearly reflected in the street names and signs, the monuments and archives that have been built on top of the ground? Is it ever enough to re-name, re-claim and re-purpose these spaces, or do we need to burn it all down?
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V i
Maybe this wide country just stretches your life to a thinness just trying to take it in, trying to calculate in it what you must do […] land fills your throat […]. It always takes long to come to what you have to say, you have to sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and point to the signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth and guess at the fall of words. (2022, 305)
Maybe this wide country just stretches your life to a thinness just trying to take it in, trying to calculate in it what you must do […] land fills your throat […]. It always takes long to come to what you have to say, you have to sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and point to the signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth and guess at the fall of words. (2022, 305)
The images of land filling the speaker’s throat and the pins pleating whole histories in her mouth enact a painful silencing of voices and stories like hers that are excluded from the “grand narratives” of history. Conversely, the colonizer’s language feels strange and foreign in the speaker’s mouth, and it takes her too long to find the right words to express what she wants to say. As a result, she has to resort to pointing at signs and guessing at the meaning of words. In this poem, the land does not offer nourishment or refuge. Rather, it is barren, cold, acrid, stretching the speaker’s sense of self into a “thinness” that does not allow her to thrive, leaving her unable to collect her thoughts, literally dissecting her into “whole parts floating in heavy lake water” (ibid.). The experience of traversing this strange land leaves the speaker feeling exhausted, isolated, alone, and the poem ends with her “giving up on land to light on”, renouncing all hope of sanctuary.
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The haptic register of soil. To run one’s hands through dirt, feeling its richness and moistness, digging and working it with one’s fingers, getting bits of earth under one’s fingernails. Breathing in the heady scent of earth, tasting it, sifting through layers of memory and that which remains. To dig into soil means digging into the past, the layers from topsoil to bedrock forming a documentation or archive, much in the same way the rings of a tree trunk record its growth. I wonder if soil can ever extend complete sanctuary to the living organisms that inhabit it, that find refuge in its darkness and dampness, whole ecosystems that shy away from the piercing light of day. I recall what Audre Lorde memorably wrote about darkness as a “place of possibility within ourselves”, and I am convinced that life in the soil has so many things to teach us about how to live life on the soil.
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In thinking about the possibilities of soil as sanctuary and foundation for repair and regeneration, I find myself re-reading Bayo Akomolafe’s essay “Coming Down to Earth” (2020). In it, he writes about the importance of radical and unprecedented forms of shared inquiry, black fugitivity***** and political organizing in times of ongoing global crisis and pandemic that are grounded in an understanding of our relationship with the “rich ecologies” (human and non-human) that surround us. He calls this practice one of “composting”, or “the disciplining decentering of a different metaphysics of destruction”******. It is this process of composting or “com/post/activism”, Akomolafe argues, that creates room for sanctuary, which he defines as “a fragile putting-into-work the very notion of companionship in a wilder world” in which we are relationally “held together by the not-knowing and the accountability to others around us” (ibid.). Akomolafe’s ruminations on composting and sanctuary are useful to a consideration of the critical endeavor of challenging, countering or “writing back”******* to site-specific histories and narratives of colonialism. First, it speaks to how a decolonial and intersectional feminist practice of citation can be understood as just that – composting and sanctuary –, at once providing a means of paying homage to the work of radical thinkers, writers, philosophers and activists who have come before, while creating and holding space for new critical voices. It is through the process of composting that these earlier seminal writings can be broken down, sifted through, sedimented and become the nourishing, fertile ground from which new thoughts and ideas, political urgencies and realities can spring forth. Second, in line with the long duration of composting, Akomolafe extends an invitation to regard planning and study as an extended commitment and long-term/life-long practice that would create a sustainable model of critical inquiry.
This drawn-out process reminds me of the slow but steadily persistent work that the ongoing street-renaming initiatives in Berlin******** (e.g. the re-naming of the M-Straße in Mitte and streets in the Afrikanisches Viertel) are doing in order to challenge the ways in which constellations of power/violence have been embedded in certain spaces and how they continue to have effects on the present-day. While things have been moving frustratingly slowly, this initiative has nevertheless brought together a diverse group of activists, scholars, artists and cultural workers who continue to redefine the parameters of sanctuary and solidarity against the backdrop of racism, genocide, extraction and colonial entanglements in the postcolonial city.
To come full circle: As Kiyan Williams voices in their single-channel video “Notes on Digging”, it is by thinking through/with soil and engaging in a deep spiritual practice of connecting with the land, that the artist is able to “transcend the myth of the individual” and understand themself as “part of something greater and larger and ancient and vital”, specifically, as part of a longer historical trajectory of Black trans struggle, resilience, survival and flourishing. For me, thinking through/with soil opens up ways for us to question and be critically reflexive of how we exist in relation to one another and to our surroundings. It invites us to partake in a kind of deep listening, empathy and softness in connection with that which exists outside of and beyond us. Such a practice not only cultivates the conditions for new forms of radical study, collective fugitivity and resistance, but also lays the groundwork for a decolonial practice of decomposition, transformation and regeneration that will sustain us and, hopefully, many more future generations to come.
*Unsurprisingly, the installation was removed by park rangers because of the lack of a permit. Nevertheless, an expanded version of the work was part of the group exhibition Monuments Now: Call and Response at Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC in 2020-2021. The exhibition catalogue can be found here: https://socratessculpturepark.org/monuments-now-exhibition-catalogue/
** Examples include their performance An Intimate Encounter with Dirt (2018), their performance, Meditation on the Making of America (2019) at The Shed, New York City in which, using soil as a primary material, the artist outlines a rough map of the USA and critiques the violence of settler colonialism and extraction or, more recently, Ruins of Empire (2022), a 13 feet high x 8 feet wide earthen ruin that references the Statue of Freedom, a historic bronze monument that sits at the top of the US Capitol Building.
*** Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (2018).
**** M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (2008)
***** In the sense of Fred Moten’s definition of “fugutivity” as “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed” (2018, 131).
****** www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/coming-down-to-earth
*******A common term in postcolonial theory to denote a critical redressing of colonial narratives and its attendant centring of imperialist and orientalist perspectives.
******** berlin.de/kunstundkulturmitte/geschichte/erinnerungskultur/strassenbenennungen/artikel.1066742.php
I would like to note here that this website, its attempt at “neutrality” and fact (e.g. including the arguments of those against the renaming of the streets), merely reproduces the violence that the street re-naming initiatives have addressed and critiqued. The full spelling of M-Straße in this document is an unnecessary provocation.
*Kathy-Ann Tan (she/they) is a Berlin-based independent curator and writer interested in alternative models of art dissemination, exhibition-making, and institutionality that are attuned to issues of social justice. Her work revolves around creating spaces for conversation, sharing, and empowerment that lies outside of academic formats and larger institutions. She puts decolonial and intersectional feminist perspectives into practice by working with local BIPOC and queer artists to develop immersive exhibitions where there is space for artistic research, encounter, dialogue, and exchange. She is the founder and artistic director of Mental Health Arts Space Berlin, a non-profit arts/project space that centers on the mental health, experiences, knowledges, histories, and narratives of BIPOC, queer, and otherwise marginalized artists and cultural workers. She is also the initiator of Decolonial Art Archives, an on- and offline platform that aims to collaboratively build a forum for artists in the visual arts and performance to network and develop sustainable collaborations across different countries and contexts.
Kiyan Williams, still from Notes on Digging, 2020
Kiyan Williams, Reaching Towards Warmer Suns, 2020