SOIL HEALTH CLINIC
PRESS RELEASE/LEX
[soil clinic values]
The Soil Clinic’s core values are rooted in a commitment to landscape justice, and deepening understandings and caring relationships between people, land, soil and ecology. In particular, we set out to attend to the ways that knowledge and power are unequally distributed between institutions and communities of soil-carers, to take a decolonial approach, and ultimately work towards shifting power and knowledge in relation to soil care.
[description of the completed tasks]
After completing the last cycle of two years, we feel that we have achieved many of the things we set out to deliver, and gathered a huge amount of learning to inform a future and improved iteration of the clinic. Our activities included: forming systems and structures to support the development of our collective; selecting community gardens to carry out the pilot in collaboration with; and delivering six Learning Circles over one year, with 61 participants attending. In these two years we:conducted test for contimanating metals, nutrients, pH, soil quality. We used audio recordings
- [image] To gather and share knowledge we used storytelling, image elicitation methods, collective visioning, video methods and other accessible mediums.
The website launch comes at a pivotal moment where we are considering the next steps, whilst also staying immersed in the ongoing composting of our learnings. In many ways the process and our findings have brought up more questions than answers, and we welcome this paradox when working with the sticky unclarity of soil through a decolonial lens.
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“It is often taken for granted that the opposite of a
question is an answer; there is a cosmic, platonic double-step logic about it.
Black is to white, as night is to day, as cats are to dogs, and questions are
to answers. But what if questions are not free-floating formations that are
summarily resolved with answers? What if questions are not made only of words?
What if questions are material things, speciated and tactile, with body parts,
particular histories of their own, affective accompaniments, genealogical ties,
and burial grounds? What if questions are like guests to a home—to be welcomed,
catered to, dusted up, considered affectionately, spoken with, and put to bed?
And what if giving an answer is sometimes the ethical equivalent of slamming a
door on the face of a guest as soon as you’ve said hello?” Bayo Akomalfe
Mirroring Bayo’s approach to questions, we welcome them and sit with them.
Throughout the clinic’s pilot stage, we brought active care attention into each moment of our work, producing detailed minutes portraying the voices of all members, learning journeys... Rather than finding responses to our questions, our work became a journey of unfolding interrogations that hinted us that the organisation of the clinic itself echoes soils and food growers needs.
[why and how]
The work we have conducted sits within the wider landscape of our busy city, full of life, distractions and injustices. This generated tensions for our work as it became increasingly challenging … In this piece as in our soil archive, we weave our reflections and activities to portray how we addressed care and health through the voices of the clinic members (minutes and reports) and the people involved in our pilots and learning circles (
This text presents another way of reading our website, focusing on questions that portray what we are taking from each phase of our collective work. For this we focused on a collective drawing made by the organising circle members in our last meeting, portraying our experiences, feelings, desires for the past two years and how they inform our collective dreaming. These questions follow a collective chronology while at the same time, raises relevant questions for past and future interrogations of the clinic.
[Questions]
Here we present a Questions chronology mapped across all the work we have done to understand London’s soils through our wide-ranging methodology:
House of Anetta
- What are our values?
We talked about the importance of centering Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) in what we do, as western science is just one way of ‘knowing’ soil. For example, using microbiology to open up our imaginations and help us relate to soil in new ways, reimagining and reframing dominant narratives (First Open Meeting).
- Why am I joining this collective?
We discussed the predicament of most gardens who often don’t know the full story of their soil, and so build raised beds or put down membranes to manage the potential risk. Having readily available soil data and testing could change the ways that gardens grow and the kinds of infrastructures needed (First Open Meeting).
“• Making soil testing and soil knowledge more accessible, open source, tangible, useful + relevant to people who grow / forage food and medicine.
• Deepening understanding & relationships between people, land, soil & ecology
• Sense of awe, making experiences of awe about our surroundings accessible to more people (meeting brief)”.
Abbey Gardens (MAY2023)
This first pilot responded to the first meetings
Sticking to the words of Max Liboron “Methodology is a way of being in the world” (p.1), part of the first learning circle embraced their words on pollution,
“Relaxed welcoming, very impressed by the food growing in the raised beds! Lovely to learn about history and how space is run. Framing at the beginning about co-learning, inclusivity, etc.” learning circle participant
>How can I hold the grief for all the pollution that has already been embedded into our soils, with little avenue for remediation?
There was an increased awareness and appreciation for the complexity of testing and repairing soil
“(I learnt) How to test soil for arsenic, ways of working with contaminated soil” (learning circle participant).
People got to explore the topic of soil pollution more deeply, reading things they would not otherwise have read, and formulating new questions and enquiries:
- “The space got me to read a text more deeply and faster, with greater motivation. Usually I would not find the time from my busy life to sit with a text like this.” (learning circle participant)
Calthorpe Gardens
Coco Collective
- (Why) are soil succession models based on temperate ecosystems?
- How can I maintain capacity for this work alongside my life?
Angel Gardens
- How can our work meet well with existing conflict?
Perhaps we need to get better at working with people who don’t agree with us, for the revolution? This will be something to reflect on further when we reach the end of the project, in relation to our core values of social justice, land justice, soil justice, food justice, racial justice, disability justice and tackling the root causes of oppression (Learning Circles and Reflections 5 & 6).
- What can we do to assist broader needs to respond to inflammation?
We need to be able to make boundaries around what we can and can’t offer, and to manage expectations responsibly. At the same time, we need to leave space for emergence and adaptation - to be able to meet communities where they are at, and not be too rigid with our plans, echoing adrienne maree brown’s call for “less prep, more presence” (Learning Circles and Reflections 5 & 6).
“For every example of colonial inflammation, we offer deep medicine, ways of thinking through how we might find one another through the work of decolonising and through building communities of care (Marya & Patel 2022: 27)”
Soil video from (Learning Circles and Reflections 5 & 6).
We look forward to the continued evolution of the website, it offers a valuable way for us to communicate with transparency about the journey and challenges, as well as sharing resources for communities and individuals that want to learn more about their soils, whether that be in collaboration with us or independently. The multiple voices and questions that have remained open over our first two years remind us of our first meeting talk about how we embrace Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) to allow different knowledges to speak to each other. We welcome the openness of these questions by honouring the pace of our work, acknowledging our needs, bringing attention and care to the soils, people and our collective dreaming.
PROPOSAL
format of quote from the attendees