Base for
Experiment
Art &
Research

The Soil of the Others

A real world laboratory for decentralizing human relation to environments

The soil, the river, the mountains: the geographical space of the Earth, form the vessel for socio-political issues we are facing. In this project, Ali Haji, architect and urban planner, and Maud van den Beuken, visual artist and adventurer, take you outside the walls of
the studio into the field. Through their exploratory, process-based and interdisciplinary practices, we work with experimental tasks, field walks and social interventions in the public spaces of the city of Arnhem, in which we engage with the world as our ‘real world laboratory’.

Human beings explore their spatial position between the upper shell of the earth and the infi- nitely expanding space above us. We appropriate space in territories and give recognition of existence by mapping them. In adopting a non-human bird’s eye perspective within Western cartography, we have come to see ourselves as the architects of the earth. We move, create and remove land. We have come to use and approach the Earth as an abstraction: as a measu- rable and verifiable map that affects our 1:1 relationship, to both the landscape as well as each other.

We consider our everyday surroundings as a complex overlap of geographical spaces and (partly invisible) sociopolitical structures. In this project we want to critically question how the human-centered practices of conventional mapping conduct our relation to our physical and social environment. Together we seek alternative ways to guide and navigate ourselves through this landscape.