Soil Is An Inscribed Body.
ON SOVEREIGNTY AND AGROPOETICS

Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre

It is from the land that bodies gather meaning, sensations, and imagination.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa [1]

In face of global expropriation of land and the devastation of its reproductive powers, we – agropoets, activists, artists and cultural workers – convene at SAVVY Contemporary to invoke, tremble, flare up, conspire, cook and plan together. Believing in the possibilities of transformative encounters, we posit collaboration and contamination as strategies against the individualising logic of the biological imagination. As Anna Tsing attested, “staying alive – for every species – requires livable collaborations.” [2]

Currently, we are struggling with having to watch from afar how the Amazon rainforest as well as forests in Congo, Angola and the Arctic are burning due to reckless and greedy human actions. The Invocations for Soil Is An Inscribed Body. On Sovereignty and Agropoetics seek to trace the exploitation of the earth’s resources and to give visibility to struggles for sovereignty over land, mind and food, and their poetic manifestations. We cordially invite you to this social gathering of performances, participatory discussions and workshops of the cross-pollination between artistic and agroecological struggles explored throughout the project as a whole.

Food is an essential part of this meeting space. In quests for justice, a sensory rooting of experiences in the present through tasting and ingesting is crucial. Through the act of eating, together with Mama D Ujuaje, founder of Community Centered Knowledge, we trace both our complicitness in global systems and networks of food production, but also microbial life passing through our bodies. Inviting activists and artists to create moments of connection and nourishment, we open up different temporalities of the soil, as collaborator, witness and social space: with Zayaan Kahn we ponder on the process such of fermentation, actively slowing down and speeding up time in learning about microbes as crucial members in a more-than-human commons. This is not just a question of food sovereignty, but also spiritual sovereignty in all relationships of cultivation. Explorations of the sonic identities of movements for land and water sovereignty and the poetic cultural manifestations, performed by Dina Amro, are joint by considerations on the soil as a witness of and subject to manmade erosion, depletion but also force of regeneration and collective care.

The Invocations create a focused moment of shared tactics, resources, and knowledges around food and land sovereignty, where we can learn from cooperative farming practices and alternative communal life, of cultivating and building living spaces of emancipation and liberation. 

Archipel Stations Community Radio will host full days of live radio with special guest Kate Donovan, broadcasting live fragments of the invocations and the exhibition, talks, and a variety of audio content from the happenings around this project. Archipel will be broadcasting via microFM throughout the spaces in SAVVY Contemporary on 90.5 FM, or you can listen to the stream from anywhere at https://archipel.community. On a tablet at SAVVY Contemporary, you can also follow Archipel's Telegram messaging group connecting rural social movements, researchers, activists and artists around the world. The audio content of this thread will become a generative radio experiment, made possible with the support of radio aporee (https://aporee.org/). 

Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
Photo: Raisa Galofre
1

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, "The Door to the Garden" (transl. by Fulvia Serra), in Women and the Subversion of the Community. A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader (Ed. Camille Barbagallo), (PM Press, 2019 [2002]), 23.

2

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, (Princeton University Press, 2015), 28.