This is part 1 of an edited transcript of the conversation:

KEYWORDS: artist, collect, earth, eat, edible, people, practice, project, samples, soil, taste

Erika Sprey: We noticed that on the level of content and interest, there were many overlaps between Studium Generale and Design Lectorate. And so we decided to make an alliance.

For the last two years Studium Generale has been exploring witchcraft, which involved many overlapping fields of knowledge such as ecofeminism and transformative justice, and with speakers such as Starhawk, we learned about accountability processes in more-than-human entanglements that we might have with the environment.

With our new topic, we address soil. For a lot of us, it’s like a very big terra incognita under our feet. It’s a massive, busy ecology of species but many of them go unnamed or unnoticed. And even though we totally depend on it, at the same time, we are letting it be degraded by climate change and human practices. We know that the Design Lectorate is also interested in toxicity, so this is another point of shared departure.

Soil is also about land struggles, land rights, Earth belonging. And of course, one way to understand this is through embodied forms of knowledge. So that's why craft was an important aspect of witchcraft and will remain so with soil. In the footsteps of Ursula Le Guin, we will call our new series of lectures and related research, ‘The Word for World is Soil’. One of the speakers we will be co-hosting is Lila Darwish who wrote the book Earth Repair and does first-line responding in situations all around the world where soils are severely damaged.

With today’s session, we wanted to make the most of how it feels to be with people again. Design Lectorate has just launched the publication Touching: A Research Method in Art & Design, so we thought it would be nice to also explore some practices that engage the senses in relation to soil and as a way into artistic creation and research.

Our first presenter is masharu. masharu’s projects combine scientific research with a personal approach and cultural practices. After obtaining a PhD in Mathematics, they were a resident in the programme at Rijksakademie and an artist fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). Their Museum of Edible Earth brings together a collection of edible soils from across the globe.

masharu: Thank you so much for inviting me to participate in this program. It really resonates with me a lot, what you do, and the way you engage feminism and queer ecofeminism. My background is in mathematics and AI but now I work as an artist. I'm actually not sure if I'm an artist, but that's how I earn my money (supported by the Mondriaan Fund).

My work is a lot about connecting with the earth and making a connection with visitors through eating earth together. Is there anybody here who has experience with this practice? Who has already eaten soil?

Tutor: Probably, but by mistake. In a lettuce that wasn’t washed properly.

masharu: And when I say earth, it can be clay, chalk, limestone, topsoil. Salt is also a type of earth.

Student: I’ve eaten it for medical reasons, as part of a cleanse. I think it was green clay.

masharu: Right so this is an interesting example because eating earth is done across the globe by humans in different contexts. And one of them can be medicinal so we have earth which is sold as an edible product, as food supplements sold in the Netherlands.

So let’s try some samples of earth. This is at your own risk. But we’ll start with one that you can buy online, that’s sold as a food supplement. Here you can see it’s made into these little grey pellets.

If you don’t want to eat it you can smell it, you can put it on your face, whatever. If you do want to try it, you can chew it. You might need some water. It can be dry!

Does anyone have any feedback?

Student: I really enjoyed it. I felt a connection to the earth in my body.

Student: I don’t like the way it sounds, scratching on my teeth.

Alice Twemlow: What kind of soil do you think is right here? Under the KABK here in The Hague?

masharu: I don’t know. But if you are curious to try soil from the courtyard here, I recommend that you heat it first.

A friend of mine, an artist from Zimbabwe, says that when he travels to a new place, he finds some earth, dissolves it in water and drinks it, because it allows him not to get sick there and to connect himself into that ecosystem. So from this perspective, we could taste the KABK soil as a way to connect, but that would be at our own risk!

I can pass a different sample now.

Student: I love this one!

masharu: Yes, this is the thing. I also fell in love with the taste of earth. It feels a little bit like being in a relationship.

Caro Verbeek: Has your sense of taste developed in relation to soil. Can you tell different types apart, like wines?

masharu: Yes, I have a good sense of the different compositions. Sometimes I can guess, but the differences are often quite subtle.

We collect feedback from visitors to the Museum of Edible Earth. And there is a database of different samples and the responses people have to them.

So the sample I’m gonna pass now is not an official supplement. I bought it in an African shop in my neighborhood in Bijlmer, Amsterdam. The shopkeeper told me it’s coming from the Congo where it is sold as a snack. And I published information about it on my website and I got people from the Democratic Republic of Congo contacting me, and they sent me some videos of how this is produced. They make sticks out of the clay and bake them in the fire.

This one is a bit hard. It’s called Mabele.

Another reason people eat earth is because of a spiritual tradition.
This sample is called Breath of God and it is produced by a church Catholic Church in Guatemala. This is a tablet which is meant for spiritual practice. The tradition existed there before the church was built, but the church people continue it. There will often be an image of the cross on the tablet.

Student: Tastes like a California campfire…

Student: It’s really hard…

Student: Yeah, we should have a dentist standing by…

Student: This one tastes like the fruit of a Baobab tree, I think…

Alice Twemlow: Before we try the next sample, I was wondering if you could give everyone a bit more of a sense of the context of this project within your practice. For example, are you the kind of collector who wants a bit of every soil on the planet? Or are the samples more like souvenirs of places you’ve been?

masharu: So the project The Museum of Edible Earth is a collection of samples of earth which are eaten by humans. If there is at least one person who is eating it, I collect it.

So it’s not that I just collect it somewhere in the field. I mean, sometimes I do. Sometimes I feel very attracted to some earth, and then I collect some and I eat it.

The collection has about 500 samples, I believe, from 37 countries. And the samples come to me in different ways. So some of them I get through the internet, or people give them to me as presents or exchanges, but I also travel and I get them from the source. So they each have a different story.

Alice Twemlow: Is there a particular moment or aspect of the whole process which you would identify as the ‘art’?

masharu: Well, that's why I said I’m not sure if I’m an artist, because I don’t know.

Alice Twemlow: Perhaps it’s the whole practice?

masharu: Yes, this project has many different components. It’s a collection of earth, but it is also infographics, maps, chemical analysis, and it is also photography, video and an interactive website where people can watch live feeds. So this is a combination of things which can maybe be classified as art. It’s also a very interdisciplinary project. I work with geologists. I work with anthropologists. I work in chemical analysis, with Dutch Food Authority. I know a successful anthropological book about earth; it’s amazing research but this author hasn’t tasted any earth. But the difference with my project is, I guess, is how much it is about trying to make a connection between people and the earth—allowing for experiencing and participating in the activity of earth tasting. I want to give dignity to earth, but it is also about just doing something I like and sharing this with other people.

Alice Twemlow: I like that the way you describe that. Do you also see this work as contributing to climate justice imaginaries? By connecting so deeply to place and finding new ways to and words to express that connection, is this a form of climate justice activism in a way?

masharu: When I started this project, which was about 10 years ago, I didn't think so deeply about it, but now I see how it triggers a lot of conversation about the pollution of soils. This idea of directly testing the soil instead of just eating food coming from it. As part of the exhibition at Zone 2 Source, we organized a ceremony with three shamans from America, who actually see the sacred activism and problems of pollution of water, but then I created for them a mixture of earths from different places for that ceremony.

Caro Verbeek: Do you use a tasting wheel—like a scent or colour wheel?

masharu: Yes, in the exhibition at Zone 2 Source we wanted to find out how people responded to the soil samples. People often use descriptors like ‘chocolatey’ or ‘woody’ or ‘minerally’. We use a wheel but we have adjusted it based on the feedback we’ve received so far.

masharu: The next sample I’m passing around is from Lithuania. This is I think the worst tasting sample of the collection. And this is coming from a person that I saw on television. She had cancer and the doctor told her she only had three more months to live. But she stopped eating food and started eating this soil. 10 years later she was quite healthy. I went to meet her and I saw with my own eyes that she was eating a lot of earth. Like everything we see on this table? She would just eat it in one meal.

I don’t eat so much. I eat like a few grams per day. One time I did an experiment when I tried to eat a lot of clay per day, but less food. And basically what happened is that I didn't have to use toilet paper anymore. So this was the result of the experiment.

Alice Twemlow: Thank you for that report of such a highly scientific outcome!