Soil Chromatography and exercising critical noticing

Soil Chromatography (photographing the soil) and exercising critical noticing

Soil chromatography illustrates the entangled stories between environments and industrial forces, making invisible processes in the soil perceivable by combining aesthetics and field-based knowledge with natural science analysis and interpretation methods. During the day-long workshop, participants will be introduced to the experimental practice of soil chromatography, discovering how nutrients, enzymes, and carbon are visualised as a unique pattern on a photo-sensitised filter paper. Participants will gain experience in measuring soil health using this ‘low-fi’ technique while learning about soil chromatography’s history and contemporary use. Through this practice, we will consider how soil, as both archive and image, can deepen our understanding of photography as a metabolic process tied to planetary systems. Alongside soil chromatography, participants will be invited to critically engage with the ways industrialisation enters landscapes: how it permeates land and water and reshapes metabolic conditions. This inquiry will illuminate methods for interpreting soil chromatography and examine ecological formations reconfigured by industrial capital. What does the soil remember, and what does it forget?

The workshop will be facilitated by Sam Nightingale, an artist and researcher working in environmental media, and PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, and by Sonia Levy a practice-based researcher considering shifting modes of engagement with the more-than-human world.

The workshop is part of the Future Matters Network, a CHASE funded network of academics and practitioners exploring how the narratives and images produced by prediction and crisis transform, translate and ultimately shape the environment, making the future an actuality of the present. This involves examining how simulation, scenario planning and predictive modelling act as speculative imaginaries - an orienting telos that redefines relationships among technology and perception. FMN also investigate the capacity of technical, representational, and aesthetic practices to uncover relations and phenomena that are invisible to the human eye. In that sense, we foster the participation of researchers that work on sensing practices that attune to kinship with the more-than-human and that approach pluriversal perspectives, and who explore how future-oriented methodologies can become sites of resistance.