Professor María Puig de la Bellacasa will give talk "Worlding Soils" as part of the Fall 2023 Lecture Series organised by Marija Marić, David Peleman, and Cesar Reyes Nájera at the Master in Architecture (University of Luxembourg) and hosted by luca – Luxembourg Centre for Architecture and Cultures of Assembly. Other lecturers in the series include Mio Tsuneyama, Paulo Tavares, and Marina Otero Verzier.
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Mine, blast, dump, crush, extract, exhaust, are the syntax of modernity, a visceral vocabulary useful to describe the destructive power of capitalism over the soil. Mine, referring both to the physical site and a property relation, sums up this power perfectly. While mines are just the starting point of a commodity chain that understands soil as a mere resource, this chain extends across vast distances, resulting in the transformation of economies related to minerals into a truly planetary phenomenon. Such landscapes of extraction—whether former or active—continue to shape material conditions of territories, soils, and communities who inhabit them. Public lecture series "Worlding Soils" centres soil—a system commonly overlooked in architectural discussion and representation—as its subject, matter, and site for the analysis of the history and evolution of capitalist extraction, and projection of solidary and shared futures of co-existence with soil hosting and sustaining us.
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