soft matter out of place II substrate
Diana Guo and alisha kapoor
To track the histories that make multispecies livability possible, it is not enough to watch lively bodies. Instead, we must wander through landscapes, where assemblages of the dead gather together with the living. In their juxtapositions, we see livability anew. —Anna Tsing, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet 7
lawn For early African-America, burial rituals left little observable trace: headstones were perishable; those that remain are uninscribed, as literacy was denied; rituals were performed during the unseen cover of night, as social cohesion was feared. Burial grounds were intentionally left unmaintained, to avoid disturbing spirits. Care was taken without monument. Washington Square, Philadelphia, once a grazing pasture, absorbed burials in its potter’s field, a place the caretakers called Congo Square, where dignity was practiced even in borrowed earth. When yellow fever raged, the city responded with sod; it became a site for kinfolk to gather. It was later re-programmed as a public arboretum and then a recreational park, as it stands today. ‘Invisible things are not necessarily not-there.’ 8 What is buried below, emotional memory, will always hold the routes back home. soil Soil is one of the most taken-for-granted building materials: worked, compacted, sourced, exhausted, it escapes graphical representation. It is the ground upon which permanence is claimed. Beneath fields, roads, lawns and settlements, soil holds accumulated traces of labour, extraction and displacement, stored them as stratified matter, the transformation of human settlement into substrate. 9 As a building material soil is cut and filled, graded and compacted, formed into mound and furrow, worked into productive ground. It circulates within landscape construction. Contractors order topsoil, clay and sand by volume, sourced from quarries, excavation sites, agricultural land and organic recycled compost. Screened, mixed and redistributed, soil is a standardised substrate, detached from the landscapes it once formed. Soil is matter out of place carrying traces of prior landscapes. Soil also records environmental history through microbial assemblages embedded in the substrate. It is diagnostic, revealing conditions obscured by dominant spatial representations. In forensic ecologies, soil is an archive of nature, Walter Benjamin’s ‘scattered fragments and traces’. 7 Anna Tsing, ‘Introduction’, Arts of living on a Damage Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene . University of Minnesota Press, 2017 8 Toni Morrison, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1, 1989 9 Canadian Centre for Architecture, From the Soil to the Sky , Elise Misao Hunchuck writes to Montserrat Bonvehí Rosich, September 2025, CCA Letters.
John Antrobus, Plantation burial , circa 1860, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana
Ozier Muhammad, Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, Marengo County, Alabama, 2016
54 on site review 48 :: building materials
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