Soil fiction: the experience of a neglected urban thing

This paper starts with the story of the Soil Fiction project – a residence in which artists, anthropologists and a soil-scientist worked together on developing an exhibition on urban soils – in order to address what speculative realism might bring to anthropological modes of inquiry. For more than 150 years, urban soils were left unnoticed by modern science because of their messiness and boundedness with human activities. Yet, they are a prevalent aspect of urban conditions of life. Through six months of collective work, Soil Fiction explored some of the neglected paths that attach us to urban soils. Departing from attempts to adapt modern-day science to urban soils, it imagined the practices of a minor science developed through a journey along them. These practices were given consistence through the creation of installations and films. Drawing on Stengers’s approach to speculative thinking, I discuss the importance of inventing propositions that work as ‘lures for feelings’. In this, rather than being a figment of the imagination, the craft of speculative imagining can attract experience. Fiction and exhibition making become ways to inquire into the world, to intensify hypothesis, and to forge other relationships with the world. I conclude that imaginative experiments such as Soil Fiction are not only knowledge practices in themselves, but also add more reality to the world. Responding to Ingold’s call for an anthropology that re-unites imagination and reality together, they conjure up research modes that do not discriminate between soils and our knowledge of them.