Surfacing Time: Inheriting the Burdens of Human–Soil Belonging: Maria Puig de la Bellacasa
HKB FORSCHUNGSMITTWOCH RECAP
On the occassion of Forschungsmittwoch #203 (20 May 2026) at the HKB Bern, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa explored how soils can become a site for rethinking relationships between humans, environments, and the more-than-human world. Titled Surfacing Time: Inheriting the Burdens of Human–Soil Belonging, her talk offered a speculative reading of practices that reclaim and reimagine human–soil relations within the legacies of anthropocentric, productionist, and colonial ecologies.
Drawing on her research on the cultural, scientific, and affective dimensions of soil, Maria examined how soils come to embody broader questions of planetary life, death, memory, and belonging. Rather than understanding soil as a passive material or resource, the discussion approached it as a living archive — a dynamic environment shaped by deep temporalities, ecological processes, and histories of human intervention.
The talk reflected on the challenges of writing alternative stories of soil belonging at a moment when ideas of rootedness and origin are increasingly mobilized through exclusionary forms of identity, including white supremacist autochthonism. Against narratives that seek purity, permanence, or exclusive claims to place, soil reveals a different kind of belonging: one grounded in mixture, transformation, decay, regeneration, and interdependence.
When nostalgic visions of the past and promises of future progress lose their capacity to guide ecological thinking, learning from soils becomes a way of surfacing time — bringing forward layered temporalities that resist linear understandings of history and development. Soil-centered perspectives invite attention to the accumulated traces, encounters, and transformations through which worlds are continuously made and remade.
The discussion connected with Maria’s text Re-animating soils: Transforming human–soil affections through science, culture and community, which explores how scientific practices, cultural imaginaries, and community engagements can transform human relationships with soils. By bringing together ecological knowledge and collective practices of care, the text highlights the possibility of cultivating different forms of attachment and responsibility toward the ground that sustains life.
Through this event, Forschungs-Mittwoch #203 opened a space to reconsider soil not simply as a foundation beneath our feet, but as a complex living archive of planetary histories, contested meanings, and future possibilities.
The video recording of the event is available here.
