Description
UN/EARTH seeks to illuminate the worlds beneath us through exploration of the physical and metaphoric soil horizons upon which landscape architecture practice is founded. The eroding, geologic, cavernous, mineral, and organic processes that have shaped our planet's crust, so often hidden and beyond our gaze, are the primary source materials for UN/EARTH. Critical and creative spaces for investigation are unearthed through a focus on varied landscape domains including soils, fertility, geological strata, subterranean infrastructure, mineral excavations, fossil records, enduring practices for living on Country, and archaeologies.
The Festival brings together four streams of thought that engage with the elements and life below and within the earth’s surface – we term these streams DEEP EARTH / RAW EARTH / FERTILE EARTH / SUBTERRANEAN EARTH. These theoretical conversations are enriched by walks and expeditions on Country to Adelaide’s north, southern coast, and urban plains, and to the Adelaide hills, Peramangk Country.
Session Themes
DEEP / EARTH
DEEP/EARTH establishes the cultural-physical-spiritual-living connection to Country and Indigenous dimensions of earth. The sessions are inspired by the spiritual and human dignity of the world’s oldest continuous societies, and the clays and deep culture of the Tarntanya / Adelaide plains. It will feature First Nations custodians and others engaging with Country and working with earth as an expressive, spiritual material to connect through.
RAW / EARTH
RAW/EARTH explores the challenges and solutions of extraction, mining, arid regions and processes, climates and cultures which excavate and expose earth. It considers how landscape architecture might better engage with the landscape shaping industries and work with more sensitivity and conviction with degraded quarry and mine sites and arid regions. In essence the session examines landscape architecture that exposes more than it covers. The idea that green is not always good, and that bare earth, sand and soil is sometimes the most honest, ethical, fitting, or necessary approach. It touches on arid, archaeological, sandy, and other types of exposed earth landscapes either by evolution, engineering or design.
FERTILE / EARTH
This session is inspired by the fertile and endangered hinterland of Adelaide. Soil is of fundamental importance to life on earth and a key to sustainability yet it is being rapidly degraded. This session engages with the living dimensions of soil as an ecological imperative with specialists on food systems, microbiomes, and soil biodiversity. Australia has the world’s oldest soils and minerals that have evolved across geological time. Once lost their culture and biodiversity can be irretrievable. How might we care for and consider this resource more intelligently and creatively? UN/EARTH will reveal the most recent research in soil science and go beyond our understanding of soils as growing mediums, to consider their inherent worth as living ecologies, their fragility, complexity, and resilience.
SUBTERRANEAN / EARTH
SUBTERRANEAN/EARTH illuminates the extensive and also subtle interventions made into the earth and seeks to overturn the terra nullius or no-man’s land of the subterranean, giving it a value as an alternative and integral, layered landscape. Deep excavations are a fundamental part of urban and human culture. Cities integrate extensive underground infrastructures and there are mines of such vast scale they can envelope whole settlements. Likewise past cultures have inhabited and crafted subterranean spaces for shelter and ecological reasons. This session considers how landscape architecture can work at the interface of the underground either to repair or to link to the world above.
Program
The Festival program extends across four days and includes walks and tours on Country pre and post the Festival.
What to expect
The Festival brings together streams of thought that engage with the elements and life below and within the earth’s surface. These theoretical conversations are enriched by walks and expeditions on Country to Adelaide’s north, southern coast, and urban plains, and to the Adelaide hills, Peramangk Country. A spectacular post-festival visit to the Ikara/Flinders Ranges, Country of the Adnyamathanha People, is also offered.