Maria Puig de la Bellacasa will be speaking at Nottingham Contemporary in the framework of the exhibition Still I Rise. Feminisms, Gender, Resistance

The talk will be on Soils, care and community: re-imagining ecological belonging

Abstract
This talk weaves together moments in scientific practice, community activism and creative art to tell stories in which soils are coming alive, revealing life within them, even a spirit. Re-animated human-soil relations are altering the perception of earth matter as inert resource passive to human use. Instead, they call for a sense of caring interdependency where the carers are not only human. As soils become enlivened a sense of human-soil interdependency is intensified, appealing to renewed ecological affinities, re-animating not only soils but also the humans who care for them. A more than human sense of community and belonging emerges, that depends on embracing the breakdown and recirculation of matter as a mundane eco-ethical obligation that disrupts the fascination with life as magnificent productivity and endurance.