The Soil Room

Free
Culinary Arts
Exhibition

Curated by
Edible Issues

The Old GMC Complex

14th December - 21st December
11:00 AM - 07:00 PM

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Welcome to the Soil Room: a space of smell, touch, play, and pleasure.

Soil loss and degradation is one of the critical issues of our time. It’s easy to forget that the future of humanity rests on 30 centimeters of topsoil. As George Monbiot writes, soil loss is “an issue considered so marginal and irrelevant” that it rarely makes headlines, despite the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warning that the world may only have 60 more years of crop production. Both agricultural and ecological issues are bound up in soil: the very future of food, as the UN report reminds us, depends on it.

While soil loss is clearly an ecological crisis, it is also a cultural one, with soil serving as a potent symbol of identity and belonging. At the same time, soil’s corollary, dirt, is a symbol of pollution at the heart of biases that lead to hateful systems of untouchability. And soil health is of course intimately tied to human health.

But rather than focus on what will be lost, we choose to focus on what can be saved. We imagine the Soil Room as a deeply grounding and therapeutic experience: urban dwellers are disconnected from soil ecology, and a fantasy of “the rural” is challenged by the realities of soil erosion and degradation. We are encouraged to “touch grass” but many have forgotten the smell of healthy soil. The goal here is to lead audiences to understand what healthy soil looks and smells like through a direct sensorial approach.

The project is a part of Smell, Memory and Food Systems. In the context of food systems and climate change, smell becomes an act of resistance, remembrance, and imagination. This curation looks to invite audiences to experience olfaction beyond nostalgia, to explore the worlds that have been erased, ecosystems in flux, and the futures we dream of tasting.

The Soil Room

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