The Soil Séance Sessions: Listening to the Soil Season 1 2023

Soils hold a mutable space, constantly shifting and changing over time. They have a genesis and a lifespan. Commentators agree that soils have no clear boundary. The Soil Séance Sessions are an invitation to individuals to spend time listening to the soil at a site of their choosing. To turn their auditory perception downwards, by using an acoustic device as a portal to the underworld. An offer to transduce, to turn one form of energy into another by way of wires, minerals (extracted) and vibratory matter. For the first season sessions have been run across seven London Boroughs and included a diverse range of people, community groups and school groups and individuals. The listening sessions were also invited to participate in the ISAScience Conference: Sonic Ties: Rethinking Communities & Collectives. ISA Science, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria. This work forms part of the project 'Ecstatic Rot' supported by the Arts Council England and Early Career Research and Innovation Fellowship 2022-23. The research investigating our relationships with transience, decomposition and re-composition as more-than-human activities. The work involves finding experimental ways to explore ephemera: the loss and flows of materialities, including cycles of transformation across species and substances. Alighting on those things and actions that challenge simplistic divisions between what might be identified as living and non-living.