The historical human preference for a sanitized aesthetic of urban nature—aiming to create planned, enclosed paradises—strips nature of its autonomy and restricts our understanding of its capacity for self-maintenance, circularity, and “unsanitized” beauty. Often dismissed as mere dirt, we enclose and compact soil, ignoring its role as an endangered, living world essential to ecological care. What would soil say if it could speak?

Enclosed soil is mounted on a beacon, inspired by architectural structures for protests (Newman, 2024), amplifying the soil's voice, giving a more-than-human entity a platform to demand care and respect. Accompanied by a site-specific performance at Eden Dock (Canary Wharf Group, 2024), where the soil is enclosed on-site, the work critiques the commodification of land and connects to broader histories of displacement and control.

“Eden” Dock itself evokes the symbolic nature of paradise, as described by Pimlott (2016): “The roots of the word paradise are from the Avestan (Iranian) language: pairi (around) and daêza (make, form, build (a wall)), meaning a bounded or enclosed space, a walled enclosure, wherein a wall surrounds the garden and separates the garden within from the world without.”

This notion of the garden as a paradise—an idealized, contained refuge—highlights how urban developments connect the idea of paradise with the enclosed and often unhealthy soil.

This layered interaction transforms the act of soil enclosure and compacting—whether for leisure or agriculture—into both a critique and a call for co-existence. Through touch, a neglected yet transformative method of understanding (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), the soil is given a voice, bridging the divide between human and non-human worlds. When a viewer interacts with the installation, words from Ana Maria Primavesi’s Ecological Management of the Soil (Primavesi, 2020) are introduced in the first person, as though the soil itself is pronouncing them. Its measured score invites audiences to hear and reflect on its silent plight, suggesting a quiet yet persistent protest.

At the core of A Soil’s Stand is also the lack of traceability of soil, a critical issue encountered during research at Eden Dock. Unanswered questions of where the soil at Eden Dock came from, reveals how land and its resources are commodified, displaced, and stripped of their context, echoing broader histories of exploitation and domination.

By weaving together these layers of complexity, A Soil's Stand invites audiences to reconsider their relationship with soil—not as an inert object, but as a living, vital world in motion. The work shifts the perspective from control to care, accountability, and co-existence.