On the Usefulness of Modern Animism: Co-Creating Architecture with Soils as Ontopolitical Practice

Abstract

As a gardener architect, I have lived and designed with many soils over my career, some are in the ground, others are on buildings. Ecosystems have been engaged with as co-creative beings and through this dialogue between human and other-than-human actants, an architectural animism has grown.In opposition to the general understanding of animism as an irrational religious set of beliefs, the-secular-modern animism embodied in this practice of built and grown architecture is operative. It conceives of places-ecosystems-as beings with agency that we garden with to nurture and express their resilience. It is a useful ontology for ecological practice; this architectural animism is ontopolitical; it co-creates a common world.In order to convey and reflect on this modern animism, as well as the method used, I have written to the soils to begin an animistic correspondence. 1 The medium places the reader in a pluriverse, in-between the multiple voices of various "actants." The text is isomorphic to the embodied dialogue of OUR earthy practice. It is useful both to nurture societal awarenessempathy and care-toward these fragmentary ecosystemic beings, and as research method to conceive them, and our relationship.These earthly beings have written back to me. ♦ Dear Eric, Thank you for your recent letter. We have been touched by your message, and the way you have-physically-touched us over the years.

The fictional soils of a ‘sustainable’ Anthropocene: A new materialist story of the soils of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

“…These tentacular earthy beings are not passive; they have agency and co-create themselves. 7 Furthermore, the paper draws on the essay A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, where conceptual artist Robert Smithson alludes to the concept of 'levels of sedimentation' or the seams of geological matter that constitute the Earth's crust. 8 Smithson's concept also applies to the complex ideological and material treatment of soil in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where dynamic materials, unseen by humans, were unearthed and layered at great speed to form three levels of sedimentation: the subsoil, the fill and the topsoil.…”

Deep Interior: Sensorial Encounters of Orang Suku Laut with the Sea

“…It pays attention to how humans read and respond to natural resources in their everyday lives through trial and error, combining knowledge and practice. Nevertheless, reading and responding to nature as basic human-nature interactions are often overlooked (Guibert, 2021;Ingraham, 2015;Suryantini et al, 2019). Therefore, investigating the acts of reading and responding to nature in hunting and gathering practised by OSL arguably expands the discussion of traditional ecological knowledge, particularly related to spatial understanding.…”

Lugar e Animismo

“…Como destaca Guibert (2021), o animismo tornou-se uma possibilidade latente para os estudos nas ciências humanas por identificar as múltiplas agências de entidades não-humanas. A questão-chave não é a metafísica das almas de entidades não-humanas, mas a maneira pela qual esses entes também agem, transformam e pensam no/sobre o mundo, cada um com sua dinâmica corporificada particular (ABRAM, 2010).…”

“…Como prática especulativa e ontopolítica, o animismo redefine a concepção de mundo como o desdobrar de múltiplos horizontes de partilha e de relacionamentos(GUIBERT, 2021). A realidade geográfica de Dardel(2011) é, logo, potencializada e infundida pela pluralidade de intersubjetividades que se desdobram das variantes não-humanas de corporeidades.…”