The Soil Does Not Speak Back

• Exploring the Relationships Between Humans, Soil, and Microbial Life

Mike von der Nahmer and Dr. Katarzyna “Kasia” Krawczyk have been selected for the fifth instalment of Earthwise Residency’s Curious Encounters. They will spend 8 weeks in residency and work on their interdisciplinary project, which explores how relationships between humans, soil, and microbial life become perceptible through scientific practice, sound, movement, storytelling, and collective artistic research. All which can be experienced in a events and exchanges throughout the autumn. Find the events in our calendar. Would you like to get into contact with either Mike or Kasia feel free to contact us.

• The Soil Does Not Speak Back is a collaborative artistic research project by Mike von der Nahmer and Dr. Katarzyna “Kasia” Krawczyk exploring the often invisible relationships between humans, soil, and microbial life.

• The project begins with a paradox: soil does not speak back in any human sense, yet it is never silent. It stores traces, transforms materials, carries microbial communities, registers environmental change, and shapes what can emerge next. Rather than imagining microbes as human-like characters or claiming a simple dialogue with nature, the project asks how relation becomes perceptible through difference, response, exchange, delay, threshold, adaptation, and residue.

• The collaboration between Kasia and Mike is the core of the project. Kasia’s scientific practice, observations, images, and short accounts of daily microbial encounters form the project’s factual and temporal anchor. Mike develops visual, sonic, spatial, and performative translations from this material. Their work is not an artistic interpretation added after scientific research. It is a shared process in which scientific inquiry and artistic practice continually question, refine, and reshape one another.

• The residency does not begin from zero. Mike has already developed an extensive research environment entitled Before We Know — Where Human-Microbe Contact Becomes Relation. It includes bilingual workshop cards, Living Scores, posters, perceptual experiments, field-note formats, relational maps, and tools for distinguishing observation, interpretation, and uncertainty. These materials explore processes such as density, gradients, permeability, exchange, latency, feedback, adaptation, thresholds, and traces.

• At Earthwise, Kasia and Mike will test, revise, and extend this material in relation to the specific landscape, soils, communities, and histories of the area. They are particularly interested in how different generations have perceived and worked with soil and nature: what has changed, what has disappeared, what remains in memory, and what forms of knowledge have passed between people over time.

• The project will include conversations, field observation, scientific practice, sound and image work, Living Scores, and participatory workshops. Most workshops will last approximately 90 minutes and will be adapted to different ages, backgrounds, and levels of experience. Participants may work through drawing, associative writing, poetry, theatre, sound, movement, dance, and Science Choreography.

• The residency will gradually create a shared collection of stories, movements, drawings, sounds, observations, and relational traces. These materials will contribute to a living atlas of human-soil-microbe relations, a series of artistic research scores, and a final public sharing in which scientific, embodied, local, and poetic forms of knowledge can meet without being forced into a single explanation.

• Curious Encounters 5 & 6 are made possible with support from the Danish Arts Foundation.