[An echoing synth that sounds like a thick string being plucked starts sporadically and quietly and builds to feel rhythmic and grounded like a heart beat.]

BINT MBAREH: Welcome to ‘Where the Soil Begins and Ends’ a sonic dive into the practice of artists Raghad Saqfalhait, Marie Hervè, and the collective Al-Wah’at, following their research residencies as part of Soil Futures.

Soil Futures was a network and programme born from the collaboration between five arts organisations; Arts Catalyst in the UK, RIWAQ in Palestine; Sakiya – Art, Science, and Agriculture in Palestine; Struggles for Sovereignty in Indonesia; and Vessel Art Project in Italy. In 2022 and 2023 this collective endeavour took the shape of a programme featuring an artist residency exchange, an online school, and a season of distributed local gatherings. Soil Futures viewed soil and those looking after it as active agents of change and resistance in the face of ongoing geopolitical and environmental crises. The project asked: What nutrients are necessary for soils to thrive? What practices of care and maintenance are enacted across territories and cultures? What ecological knowledge and approaches nourish both lands and communities?

Over the next fifty minutes you will listen to the Soil Futures artists reflecting on the landscapes, stories, and people they encountered during their residency. Raghad delves into her work with clay between Al-Jib in Palestine, and Solento in Puglia in Southern Italy. Marie describes the time she spent with stones and the stories they tell in Qalandiya near Jerusalem. Areej, Ailo, and Gabriella share their collaborative work in Ein Qiniya contemplating the significance of the prickly pear and the cochineal insect for the palestinian land.

I’m Bint Mbareh and my voice and compositions will accompany you across these territories following soils, art practices, and the ground they share.

RAGHAD SAQFALHAIT: Both in Salento in Puglia and in Al-Jib near Jerusalem, in my research I was following the craft of making pottery starting from the soil which constitutes the first step and the main ingredient of this craft.

BINT MBAREH: This was Raghad Saqfalhait, she was part of a residency in Salento which facilitated her thinking around what the soil is and what it can tell us about plurality. Part of what contextualises her research is work she has done previously in Al-Jib. Which is a village kind of around Jerusalem. Raghad will tell you more about all of these places in time.

MARIE HERVÈ: I was like, oh who is this, who entered inside my house? You know? And actually there was steps going to the roof, and I was terrified. And then I calmed down and I understood that there was a group of teenagers going around the roof and staying there. It was not late at night but I go to sleep quite early. But they were going around and sitting there and maybe chatting, and then they would go away. And I asked the question around and it was “sometimes they go there and they just meet there on this roof because usually there is no one living there, so they are not disturbing”. And this was something for me that created this sense of like living with the stone actually, like using it was also this, saying ok, I could be part of this group of teenagers sitting on the stone and chatting, having this relationship with it. Not just actually as a monument, or something like, you know we rebuilt this house, it’s supposed to look this way and it’s made for the artist in residence. For me, I was really happy to wake up in the night with the people chatting on the roof.

BINT MBAREH: That was Marie Hervè, in her residency she focussed on the transformations and the many futures that stone can narrate. She was just describing one of her earlier experiences of being in Qalandiya and how the stones in the building she lived in could both host an ancient history and a speculative young future. Qalandiya is a town near Jerusalem which has experienced one of the more violent enforced borders separating the West Bank from Jerusalem.

AREEJ ASHHAB: I mean it’s in the name of the project, Wild Hedges. The cactus historically was used to plant hedges not only in Palestine but all around the Mediterranean region, and for us like this new spread of the insect became like a window to look into the messiness of like the histories involved between the two species, and looking at the porosity in these hedges, whether metaphorically or more like physically: through the insect actually going through the hedge and eating it up but also breaking the binaries used in colonial language between the human and the natural, between the wild and the domesticated, between the invasive and tamed and all these terms. So it became like, engaging with the materiality became a way to kind of physically interact with these more abstract divisions and also more physical divisions.

BINT MBAREH: And that was Areej, one member in the collective Al-Wah’at. Areej was referring to how their project Wild Hedges broke the boundaries that are often imagined between what’s natural and what isn’t. The project looked at the Cochineal as a parasite that was labelled invasive in the Palestinian landscape, leeching off of cactus plants, but also could be seen producing beautiful red dyes and being used as an active member of the ecosystem in some parts of the world. So, parts of this project took place partially in Sakiya, a village near Ramallah, which is often attacked by Israeli forces and settlers. Another part of the project took place in Om Sleiman Farm in Bil’in, another village overlooking one of the bigger settlements in Palestine, so I felt that in their project it was hard to ignore violent and imposed borders. I asked them a bit about how they saw interfaces or material frictions appearing in their work, and if they thought about how the borders of the materials they use break open or begin dissolving with touch and human intimacy.

AILO RIBAS: I mean I think it relates to our thinking around hedges and around these porous boundaries both in language and on the land.

BINT MBAREH: That was Ailo, another member of Al-Wah’at. I also spoke with Gabriella, the third member of Al-Wahat Collective. Gabriella explains a little further about their process in relation to interfacing physically with the world of the cactus.

GABRIELLA DEMCZUK: Because our process is so material driven and because it is so integrated in the land, when we got to Sakiya for our Soil Futures residency, we needed to forage the cactus and its fibrous mesh, and we needed to collect the cochineal, so already these practises became rooted in touch but then we also opened it up to the community and we invited people in to join us, and so we had a series of workshops where we would go out and we would forage for the cochineal and for the cactus and then we would go back to Sakiya and we would experiment with the cactus. We would find ways to integrate the mesh fiber into weaving, into building. We also experimented with the cochineal, we were first just taking the cochineal and squishing it into our hands, and seeing how the cochineal produces this carminic acid, this beautiful deep red and then squeezing lemon into our hand to then change its colour too this more vibrant orange and it was through these experiments that we started to understand the way that we could change the colour of the cochineal, of the pigment, by adding more acid that would transform it to this more orange colour and then adding an alkaline like soda ash that would take it to this deeper dark purple and then we could paint with it, we could dye with it, and then we were even also using the pads for cooking, we were meeting with people who had learned how to cook with the pads, how to pickle it how to bring it into a salad and into tacos. So I really think touch and the materiality of the cactus and the cochineal was how we were able to bring people together in a way that we were all learning together, and experimenting together, and it was through these processes that we came to understand that these artistic interventions were also practises of care and repair, because the cochineal was eating away at the cactus and drawing out all of its water and slowly killing it, just the act of harvesting the cuccinilla from the pad helps to sustain the cactus.

BINT MBAREH: It makes a lot of sense to me that Al-Wah’at want to locate and reiterate care in the context where the cochineal was being understood only as a pest. The process of breaking the boundary between what belongs on this land and what doesn’t is inherently political, and Al-Wah’at extends this boundary breaking into the more than human.

AILO RIBAS: In fact why the cactus was brought to the Mediterranean was initially to try to cultivate this insect, so their histories are intertwined and they’ve both been domesticated in tandem for thousands of years, that’s the only reason these species have come to exist in the way they exist now is through human care for both species, so we kind of wanted to bring that care back because the kind of ecological situation that we have across the mediterranean is the cactus is dying and governments, communities, individuals are trying to control the spread of this insect in one way or another, either through pesticides or introducing other insects, and we kind of wanted to reintroduce this idea of care and repair as a way to try to balance this ecological imbalance in a more holistic, grounded, rooted way. And that involves, you know, collecting the insect by hand, pruning the cactus, ensuring that the hedges don’t have too much shaded underbellies which is the spaces where the insect really likes to thrive and if there’s too many spaces like that it can cause the insect spread to really become overwhelming for the plant. So allowing some kind of air to move through and some sun to pierce into the depths of the cactus allows the insect population to be more in check. And we see these practises of care and repair not only as practises of care towards the cactus but also towards the communities that live with these species because they can use the insect as a material that was previously disregarded as a material for dyeing, for making inks, to introduce into local crafts, and the cactus as well as the fibers, using them in construction, in sculpture, in other crafts as well, things like that. So yeah, we’re trying to think of these practices as practices of care and repair not only for the plant and for the insect but also for the people that live with them.

What fascinated us about the plant itself is not only its messy colonial history, and how it arrived in these places but the symbolism and the love towards the plant that is had in so many of these spaces, in Palestine, in Spain, in Italy all across the Mediterranean, there are so many communities and cultures that appreciate the cactus not only for the fruit, but also as a hedge plant, but also symbolically as a symbol of resistance and connection to the land, rootedness in the land. So I think it's quite easy for people who care about the cactus to then see the insect as this pest, this toxic parasite which is killing the plant they love and therefore is evil and should be exterminated, and we kind of wanted to move away from this, like Areej said, colonial kind of binary language around invasiveness and utility because you know in Mexico this insect, at least the domesticated version is highly prized.

BINT MBAREH: While Ailo just pointed out how care can work across and through species, I’m returning to Raghad to learn about another migrating insect that helps with obscuring where the soil begins and ends. And because all the artists I’ve interviewed were working in Palestine, knowing, mapping, and learning about the land was never a politically neutral endeavour, so I asked them about how, in addition to showing their work, they go about hiding it and encrypting it. Raghad Saqfalhait responds.

[Music shifts to a faster pace with lighter synth sounds jumping between echoes.]

RAGHAD SAQFALHAIT: When I think about the contrast between the aboveground and the underground, I always get the image of these earth worms that cause bioturbation, it’s what they call in soil science, which is like they’re always churning the soil upside down, they’re always mixing soil profiles together although at a very low tempo, but they are still doing that. And they’re often causing problems for archeologists. You know in Archeology there’s even a name for this line that separates the let’s say, “geological pure, natural soil” and then the “anthropogenic soils” on top of it, which holds the remains of past lives, and past occupation of the land and this line is important for them because it sort of defines their area of study and helps them put a limit to how deep they want to go into the ground, but then these worms always- like for me they really challenge sometimes how I think about this contrast between what is above and what is below, like even when we think of concealment- concealing something or hiding, now that you ask about hiding, we maybe think of accumulation or burial as hiding, or maybe these tunnels in Al-Jib which were used, or which were excavated to extract the clay, and then they were destroyed in order to make room for the military checkpoint that came afterwards, maybe they are still there in the ground, but now they are hidden by a checkpoint only for people to, I don’t know discover them hundred years later if they are still there. I think hiding really, maybe it’s in these moments when like landscape is forced to perform a sort of legibility in order for it to be studied and for it to be turned into like this object either for extraction or for study or for analysis, and then I think these biological natural processes of the earth, that they are the ones who are responsible for keeping the soil forming and keeping it always as I said like a living organism, I think they are what is actually doing the hiding.

BINT MBAREH: One of the main tools of knowing land in a colonial way, or at least finalising its shape for objectification, consumption, and ease of access for conquerors, is the map. Marie explains how mapping through experience rather than a birds eye view visual guided her process in Palestine.

MARIE HERVÈ: Actually I started my practise with mapping what I thought was a kind of precise territory that is the Mediterranean territory. I come from Marseille, I have this history linked with the sea, but not just the sea. The Mediterranean sea would work like this island for me in the middle of you know this land that goes around the sea, so I started with this idea of I’m going to document this area. And I thought it was, you know, known to everybody what the Mediterranean area was, like the limits of it, and the more I worked on this landscape and territory and culture, because you know it’s not just the geographical limits, the more I discovered that nobody agrees on what the Mediterranean territory means. And this is exactly my point going also to Palestine, first of all to stop romanticising this territory, because it has been in the past and it goes on in France etc., you have this way of talking about you know, our ancestors that built this civilisation, this Western civilisation which is at the centre of everything of course- so to stop romanticising this area, and also to actually experience what the limit means in political terms. What does that mean? And actually of course I started with the wall because you have to go through it, so you have to physically experience the limit. And then you have all the consequences of this limit, that is violence actually, so it’s not this romantic way actually of seeing you know geography, and archeology as this kind of abstract way of studying a territory. You have to physically experience it as a weapon and the violence of it. And then, to actually shift the focus- I didn't want to focus on the wall because it seems like it’s the only central point when we talk about this territory, and it’s not, it cannot be, and I think it’s also a violence if you go there to talk only about the wall. Because this is violence, so I wanted to shift the focus.

BINT MBAREH: Marie is sharply aware that her experience crossing any and all of these borders is different from that of Areej, who is Palestinian. So what does gathering in land being confiscated, in other words, a map constantly being redrawn to the benefit of the coloniser mean for Areej?

AREEJ ASHHAB: Especially in the last year, it became more for us also a way to be together and revisit some of the mythologies and rituals through this practice of ink making and dyeing. Especially in the past few years in the context of Ein Qiniya and the West Bank with the increased violence, settler violence, we took it as an opportunity also to reconnect with land based kinship: specifically the site of Ein Qiniya, the Qayqab tree, the one with the red bark, we have engaged with it for like a specific ritual around the making of processional flags, so we have been reinterpreting those flags through printing with cochineal on them, and embroidering them and dyeing pieces of fabric tying them on the tree to connect between a myth around this specific species of tree in Palestine around the colour red, and a myth that we learned about in Mexico about how cochineal came to being also related to the colour red and both are related to bloodshed, family bloodshed. So we were trying to- also by revisiting some of the conversations about those histories, myths, and rituals, to practise care, communal care- beyond just the ecological practices that we were trying to address.

BINT MBAREH: The flags Areej is referring to here are used in pilgrimages across land to various shrines and spiritual locations dotting the landscape in Palestine and the region. They denote who is travelling from far away, either by family or community name, or by the name of the village they come from or the organisation they represent. They are in themselves a kind of map that can demarcate who lives where and the flag bearer’s connection to the land. Clearly, access to land, like the one Al-Wah’at mentions, Sakiya’s land in Ein Qiniya can cultivate or cut off people’s relationships to skills like flag-making and bearing. Another one of those skills is excavating for clay. Raghad can tell us more about the progress of access to literal earth, through the story of Wardeh in Al-Jib.

RAGHAD SAQFALHAIT: In Al-Jib a village north of Jerusalem, which was a very famous centre for making cooking pots, or Qdoor, clay sourcing changed according to access to the land, and when I say access I mean both vicinity to these sites from the village but also whether the potters were able to physically reach them under conditions of Israeli occupation and land seizure orders. So following Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem in 1967, about a quarter of the land of the village was seized, by military orders for the establishment of Israeli settlements, and you can actually trace the increasing fragmentation of the land through tracing what clay sources people were using every period. And so for a long time clay was extracted in tunnels underground, in an area called Al Matayen, which means the clay area. It was actually the women who extracted the clay, it was anyway a woman craft, in Al-Jib and other villages, not like in the cities which were predominantly- it was a male craft in the cities. And they told me that the women, they would challenge each other while they were digging to get to the purest clay underneath, so the clay that is not contaminated with stones or dust or rubble or whatever is on the surface or plants or so. So this was a more concealed form of extraction, and with the advent of machinery they started digging in open pits and selling it to other potters in Palestine. So potters from Jericho, from Ramallah, Jerusalem, and other places in central Palestine, they would come and they would buy this type of clay. You know we’re talking about this very high quality type of clay that was used at least since Roman times. Some archeologists did some sampling of pots that were found in Jerusalem, Roman pots, and they found that the clay source was Al-Jib.

So yeah, until 1985-1986, Al Matayen provided the main source of clay for the potters, and following that, with the expansion of the Giv'at Ze'ev Israeli settlement, people were denied access to the land. So potters were no longer allowed to come close and take- and dig out from the clay, except for the Palestinian labour who were given work permits to work inside the borders, and so these men would sometimes bring back with them, after a day of working, they would bring back some clay bags and they would give it to the potters to use it. And then after, this, after the work ended in the settlement, potters like Wardeh, who like when she couldn’t get clay from the other side of the border, she would turn to unused earthen domestic objects like Khawabi which is a clay storage unit and she would crush it and then turn it back to a clay body that she would use to make pots and she would sell it.

In Salento this process of digging the clay or the sites where the clays were dug from would change every year, because digging was a byproduct of tuff extraction. Tuff is a soft limestone that was used in construction. So digging the clay was actually the job of the pozzari. Pozzari comes from the word Pozzo, waterwell, so they were the well diggers, because in Salento there’s very dry land, and so digging for wells was very common, and so these people would dig wells and the clay that came out of digging the wells would be then sold to the potters and you know it changed ever year and we’re talking until the mid last century before the potters started buying commercially produced clay from Florence. In Al-Jib, which is a very famous centre for making cooking pots or Qdoor since like 5000 years, this process of digging the clay changed not every year- but it changed according to access to these sites.

BINT MBAREH: And on the subject of transforming archaeological artefacts or ruins, since Marie works with capital R Ruins in the form of stone, what does she think of their transformation and return? I couldn’t help but see some parallel with the water cycle, of a body of water escaping capture and objectification imposed by humans, and how it returns in different formats, so I asked her about that.

MARIE HERVÈ: It’s working with stone so something that should be heavy or you know like stay in this fixity, and actually I rather choose to look at it with this cycle linked to the territory, and water arrives in this moment of working with with allowing something to grow and to be alive. So this is the opposite of the ruin, it’s more talking about something that can become a ruin but with the knowledge of its shape and where it’s going and allowing it to exist that way.

BINT MBAREH: The emphasis on living bodies, stone bodies, human bodies, cactus bodies in living land was present throughout all the artists I spoke with. Ailo reiterates why Al-Wahat made a conscious or subconscious choice to make many contexts where people could touch land.

AILO RIBAS: It felt important for us to touch materials and the soil and use our hands because often so many of the decisions that affect these ecosystems and invasive species are made by people who don’t use their hands and don’t touch the soil with their hands and don’t touch these plants and materials with their hands, they’re not part of these ecosystems and they’re not familiar with these ecosystems so we kind of wanted to get to know the materials that we’re working with in a deeper way and in a more intimate way. I don’t think it was necessarily super conscious from our perspective but it definitely became like a very important aspect of the work.

BINT MBAREH: For Gabriella from Al Wahat, touch wasn’t a byproduct of the fact that they wanted to work with a material like the cactus, it could also be a necessary pull away from alienating technologies to ancient technologies which relied heavily on the human body as a mediator and steward.

GABRIELLA DEMCZUK: I think touch is really important to think about in relationship to technology, especially technology today that is moving us towards the digital and the virtual, a world separated from the physical and from haptic technologies- embodied ways of knowing the world and making sense of our world. So going back to a technology like dyeing that is thousands of years old; it really requires you to use all of your senses. You’re not only mordanting fabrics and dyeing with your hands, but you’re carefully watching how colours change with different additives, different water types, and timing, you are listening for change in the dye if you’re using a fermentation process, and sometimes you’re even tasting and smelling the dye vat to understand the health of the dye and the health of the bacteria that’s in the dye. So I think it’s through these slower processes, these slower technologies that we begin to cultivate a deeper connection for the land and a respect for its offerings, while simultaneously also creating a sense of care for our own work, for the time and effort that we are bringing into the work. This is definitely something I’ve learned from the dyeing with the cochineal and spending time with this insect.

BINT MBAREH: There’s something very valuable in this line of thinking through the body with its sensorial capacity, but since all the artists are already problematising what is a human body and what it isn’t, or where the body begins and ends, Raghad’s comments on plurality within the body of the soil are really important, especially juxtaposed with a romantic and singular body of soil which is common in Palestinian rhetoric about return to the soil, love for the land, and an imaginary unified vision of what the soil is. In her work it is allowed to multiple and complex.

RAGHAD SAQFALHAIT: I think there is a strong emotional and political need in Palestine to imagine the soil as unified, as defragmented, you know, as like a homeland, or fertility, or the keeper of memory, or the keeper of stories, but soil becomes symbolic I think because people are denied physical access to land, so the image of soil has to hold what we want it to hold, either it is the grief, or the resistance, or the ancestry. And when I think about soil I think of it as accumulation of all of these things together, so like all the material but also the immaterial traces I think, so materially speaking or like chemically speaking soil resists singularity because it is mainly a living matter, it is always forming and reforming, it is like history and present that is constantly being metabolised into matter, so the marine organisms for example that I encountered in Salento, for me they are not objects inside the soil, they are the soil itself, and working in Salento and seeing them like this really made me think about the constitutions of soil let’s say or what the soil is made up of. The same thing also in Al-Jib, I saw a lot of pottery fragments inside the soil for example, and then when you look at the texture of the soil and the lightweightness of it, of the archeological soil in Al-Jib, you then start to realise that actually this soil has components from the pottery shards that were crushed with time, and they became a part of the soil or for example the ashes that people used to burn- animal dung as fuel, they lived by means of fire, so even the ashes also make this soil very lightweight. So soil is always in a constant state of becoming something else, and that for me really challenges or changes the idea that soil is one thing. So in some ways, like thinking materially about the soil made it less romantic but more intimate in a way because the intimacy comes not from projecting meaning onto it but from recognising that the ground itself is actually composed of countless relations, you know organic, geological, political, and historical that sort of exceeds our imagination or what we want to project on it, so for me it became a process of just staying attentive to these- to what worlds the soil has inside of it, and yeah, in my work, rather than forcing the soil to disclose everything, to disclose all the answers, I’m interested in allowing the space for what the soil cannot really say in very direct or immediate ways.

BINT MBAREH: Finally, I wanted to share one beautiful moment that emerged out of Al-Wah’at’s workshops. Areej introduces it here.

AREEJ ASHHAB: Yeah one of the participants, Raya who began like just creating the melody and like singing it while we were like at a workshop at Om Sleiman Farm in Bil’in near Ramallah. We were gathering there to build a shade roof from the cactus fibres, we had already peeled them from dried up trunks in the village, and in the surroundings- cacti that had already withered from the spread of the insect, and it’s an exploration we had been doing for a few years already of like seeing what can be done, and it’s actually an idea that came up while- throughout conversations with Sakiya, Sahar specifically, who really wanted to create a shade for the outdoors area for Sakiya in the Summer specifically because the cactus when it dries up it creates this beautiful like skeleton- it leaves behind this beautiful skeleton of meshy fibers that create beautiful shades, so we had been exploring how to kind of stitch them together to create those shades, but unfortunately, specifically when were gathering for this kind of experimenting with the building the situation in Ein Qiniya had already become a bit dangerous so we decided to explore this first with Om Sleiman Farm who had been planning activities with the children, they had a summer camp or something so they wanted to cover an area with the cactus and it was actually really interesting because it was actually the participants who came up with the song just based on what they understood from us- what they understood from the process itself of peeling the cacti fibers, especially Raya because she has attended all of our workshops almost so she knows how the project has evolved and she has also been part of supporting us through Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. So she started singing it and of course there’s a little bit of cursing of the insect and how it killed our ancestral cacti, and the cacti in Arabic they’re called Saber, so there’s also this symbolism of like the insect eating up our patience- Saber meaning patience. It was kind of a celebratory moment at the end of the workshop where we are all like under the shade. Yeah, it just came up really spontaneously that we decided to record that moment. It was interesting to hear how participants processed that- in a way also like grief for the cacti and maybe for us as researchers we don’t see it in those terms, we also have a different idea of the insect now. It was very touching to hear how- and just let it happen, and engage with the song collectively.

[A crowd of people sing in Arabic clapping their hands while one member of the group calls out a line for the others to respond to. Their energy builds as the song progresses. They end the song by laughing and cheering.]

BINT MBAREH: Soil Futures took place in 2022 and 2023, it was supported by the British Council’s International Collaboration Grant. To find out more visit the project website soilfutures.artscatalyst.org
Thank you for listening.

[Small trickling synths fade into each other as they turn into abstract echoes that fade out into scilence.]