Artists in Conversation

In July 2014, I attended the Soil Culture Forum hosted by Falmouth University over a period of four days at the Woodlane campus. The 90+ delegates, who attended focused on how the arts could help to raise awareness and an appreciation for the plight of global soils. The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW) initiated 12 Soil Culture artist residencies, which took place across the South West of the UK. They provided time for research, experimentation, the development of new work, and aimed at encouraging an exploration of the importance of soil.

Artists in Conversation was a discussion platform devised and chaired by me. It constituted five evening events which took place in collaboration with Back Lane West in Redruth, Cornwall between 2014 – 2015. It gave the Soil Culture artists the opportunity to present their work to audiences from differing disciplines and walks of life and encouraged debate about the significance of the work in relation to the soil’s vital role in maintaining the future of life on earth and wider socio-cultural issues relating to territory and ownership.

Artists in Conversation has evolved as a legacy of the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World’s (CCANW) Soil Culture project. Running in parallel with all the CCANW artists’ residencies, it sought to pay homage to the United Nations year of soil, whilst promoting the widening debate around the potential of soil and what it represents.

Artists in Conversation has and is informing the basis of a body of research, which starts with the notion of soil as a common denominator of both ownership and authorship, which in the context of the Soil Culture project, constitutes both a microcosm of land and a medium and tool of the artist. One of the fundamental questions that emerges out of these ideas, is how important or necessary is it for society and artists to relinquish ownership and authorship, for the sake of social change? Drawing upon the socio-cultural and political concerns surrounding the participatory arts and social change, Artists in Conversation has sought to provide an open platform for debate, to which the Soil Culture artists in residence have contributed, with reference to their own art practice and broader cultural concerns challenging capitalist land divisions and socio-cultural divisions, which have depleted both soil and society of their well-being and good health.

The sociologist, Anthony Giddens (1976, 1979) proposes that we construct our society and society constructs us and in this pattern of being, we can perpetuate the status quo, quite happily, but what about social change? Giddens suggests that through innovative acts of human agency social structures, such as government policy, might be reconfigured. And in a sense the coming together of the arts and sciences, is an example of innovative human agency, manifest within ventures like that of the CCANW Soil Culture project, which hopefully disrupt the complacency that surrounds soil and its future.

Patrick Holden, the once director of the Soil Association, and Sustainable Food Trust, who now continues to manage his organic farm in Wales, after 41 years, made a poignant statement at the Falmouth University Soil Culture Forum in July 2014, when he proposed that we need to engender a more spiritual and emotional connection with the biological. He referred to the “soil as the stomach of a plant” so if the soil is unhealthy, the plant is unhealthy, and as a consequence we as the consumers of those plants are also unhealthy. This symbiotic relationship with soil, has been neglected by humans for too long, but it is initiatives like the CCANW Soil Culture project, and its legacies, like that of Artists in Conversation, which aim to enhance an appreciation of soil and develop a common language and critical discourse around the health, wealth and ownership of soil.

In the end it is not about command and control, it is about humility. Relinquishing ownership and authorship becomes part of that humility, thus creating a common ground, which is neither state nor privately owned, but one that allows for the sharing of both economic and cultural capital.

References

Giddens, Anthony. 1976. New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretive Sociologies. London: Hutchinson.
Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Published in Lascelles, B., Adams, C and Montag, D. (2016) Soil Culture: Bringing the Arts Down to Earth. Manchester: Gaia Project Press

Artists in Conversation

Rachel Hindley

Writing: