Since last year, our pilot project in 2014 has had a revival and has become the current research focus of our creative director, Ela Spalding. The idea of reviving Soil stems from the 2020 pandemic and quarantine as a powerful way to support individuals and communities to reconnect with their environment and expand solidarity networks.
In April 2020 Ela was invited, due to her work with Estudio Nuboso, to present a case study at The Shape of a Practice for the Anthropocene Curriculum at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and decided to focus on Suelo. Here you can read and see the materials she gathered for it: Suelo: Expanded connections to soil, land, community and territory . After the experience at that event, sharing practices with many like-minded projects around the world – all working hard to raise awareness about the role that humans play today in our society and environment – it became clear that creating a Suelo Methodology for others to implement in their territories and contexts could be something of value.

A few months later, in dialogue with our allies of the Green Art Lab Alliance the idea arose to offer this methodology in gestation to the group, on a trial basis. Especially because many of these allies are based in specific territories and work with communities and the land, whereas we (Estudio Nuboso) were still in a period of pause / reflection and ideation of our next nomadic steps. In our working group for Biodiversity and Reforestation, everyone agreed that indeed the soil is the essence of life, and this approach is a very nice way to intertwine many common practices and issues. And so began a conversation to break down the concept and design of Suelo into the layers and steps necessary for others to more easily grasp.
Ela set to work on an image to help summarize the methodology, using a soil profile as a base. Her experiments were proving quite useful in explaining what this methodology can achieve at different scales. So when our colleague Dominique Ratton invited her to make a portal (poster) for the summer exhibition Para que haya fiesta tienen que danzar el bosque,- a project curated by Michy Marxuach in collaboration with multiple transhemispheric voices, at the Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, she submitted the following image to be riso printed, joining the many other portals of ecosocial solidarity in the exhibition.
A couple of months ago, Ela received a curatorial research grant from the Berlin Senate. This funding is going to allow her to further develop the methodology in the coming months. She continues to engage in dialogue with GALA colleagues. One of them, the Mar Adentro Foundation, invited her to write a text about her vision for Suelo and it has just been published in their publication for the exhibition Naturaleza Expandida, curated by Maya Errázuris and Carlo Rizzo. It’s a beautiful piece of work! Meet the publication online here. And the article on Suelo’s vision can be read directly from our SUELO page, which we will be updating as the Suelo Methodology takes shape.