Soil Fictions: Addressing Urban Soils between Art, Soil Ecology, and Anthropology

This paper examines how artistic collaborations between anthropologists and natural scientists can help address challenges that themes relating to the Anthropocene and more than human realities pose to academic disciplines. It draws on a one-year collaboration among two anthropologists, two artists, a soil ecologist, and a geographer working toward an exhibition on the heavily anthropogenic soils of cities. The preparation of speculative Soil Fictions—narrative installations shown in the exhibition—allowed experimenting with new modes of inquiry that proved complementary to more traditional ethnographic methods. The authors argue in favor of wider recognition of such experiments within anthropology.