Soil Séance Sessions: Season II 2024

For the second season of the Soil Séance Sessions participants were asked to engage with the question of what might it be like to commune with the ground? To turn their senses downwards - using an electrical device as a portal to the underworld in the context a cemetery. For centuries people across the planet have buried their dead, indeed the very origin of the word human might refer to being of the earth. Many people believe our ancestors live on, in the earth. Soils have no clear boundary. They originate from rocks transformed over millennia by climate conditions, geological movements, biological processes, pollution and the actions of organisms, at different scales of magnitude. Soils complicate modern dualisms between nature and culture. They are both living and non-living. The sessions give people an intimate opportunity to spend as little or as long a time as they pleased tuning into the micro processes transforming the cemetery soil. The work’s practice-based research uses experimental methods involving listening practices, (based on Pauline Oliveros), and participants own imaginary, to connect to processes and material transformations in the burial grounds beneath their feet. The auditory work for the second season took place in two European cities - Abney Cemetery Park in the Bough of Hackney. One of the Magnificent Seven garden cemeteries in London, created in the early C18th over 31 acres. Also in Westefried & Hauptfriedhof, the latter again established in the C17th in Kassel, Germany. The sessions took place in May to August 2024 and included over fifty participants. This work has been funded and supported by National Lottery & Arts Council England, Abney Park Trust, Museum for Sepulkralkultur, Kassel, Germany and ADMRC & Early Career Research and Innovation Fellowship Scheme at Sheffield Hallam University. It extends the research project Ecstatic Rot investigates the 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.