Soil vivisection is a sound installation that ponders upon the relentless exploitation of land, alluding to the incidences of the continuous transformation processes that land undertakes within cities. It also pursues to invoke reflection towards the relation between soil and people, and simultaneously to rethink about the need of a symbiotic approach to its use.

This piece is part of a collaboration project between the sonic arts student Loris Foti and architecture students Max Rüfli and Bendix Feldstein, which is based on the rainwater retention basin—now FloatingUniversity Berlin—of the former Tempelhof airport as a model of the transformation phenomenon mentioned before.

Transitions from forests to human settlements, then to artificial ecosystems and rehabilitated cultural spaces where we now try to reintegrate ourselves with nature. Earth, soil, land, ground, in any of its dimensions and forms, has endured a series of extreme manipulations for human needs and ambitions; left eroded, sealed, polluted, uncovered and degraded afterwards.

Soil vivisection invites us to contemplate a sample of soil to reflect on the alienation we suffer from it through a self-evidencing event—suggesting such detachment to be a byproduct of its exploitation. As a vivisection of a creature, a vivisection [of soil] insists on addressing the often detached practices of human consumption and juxtaposing that with the intention of self-referencing our human capacity to repair and amend through giving voice to that which appears to lack a voice.