The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory
5th & 6th December 2020
Online at themind.fish
The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. With The Understory of the Understory, we go to that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, the place where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet.
Alex McBratney holds BSc, PhD and DSc degrees in soil science from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and the DScAgr degree from the University of Sydney for research in precision agriculture. He has made major contributions to soil science and agriculture through the development of the concepts of Pedometrics, Digital Soil Mapping and Precision Agriculture. After completing his PhD work at Rothamsted Experimental Station in the UK, Alex spent seven years with CSIRO Division of Soils in Brisbane. Alex joined the University of Sydney in 1989. He is currently Director of the Sydney Institute of Agriculture and Professor of Soil Science. He is Editor of the global soil science journal, Geoderma. He is heavily involved with the activities of the International Union of Soil Sciences and the global digital soil map project, GlobalSoilMap. In 2014 he was awarded the VV Dokuchaev medal by the International Union of Soil Sciences, which is the highest honour in the soil science discipline. Currently he is helping to develop and promote the concepts of global soil security and digitally decommoditised agriculture.
Asad Raza creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as an active, metabolic experience. Absorption, in which artificial soil is made from waste and given away, was shown as the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney in 2019, and at Gropius Bau, Berlin in 2020. In Untitled (plot for dialogue), visitors played tennis in a sixteenth-century church in Milan, while in Root sequence. Mother tongue, caretakers grew a grove of trees in a museum. Minor History, a dialogue with his 91-year old uncle, premiered at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
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