Soil Affinities.
Soil Affinities is a long-term research project that traces agricultural histories from Europe to its former colonies and back, exploring connections between plants and people across different geographies and temporalities. Orlow uses video, photography and archival research to construct new narrative modes and image regimes in a non-linear display. Developed through extensive collaboration with international experts and consultants, institutions and museums, the work’s realisation encompasses multiple iterations and installations. This multicomponent output includes: wallpaper, HD video and sound installed, 11 custom made crates, photographs, duratrans, archival documents and soil. It includes an associated monograph with commissioned texts. See Portfolio Booklet for documentation of research dimensions.
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qv09x
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- Soil Affinities was first exhibited at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris, October 11–December 8, 2018. Further details in portfolio.
- Brief description of type
- Other: Multicomponent
- Open access status
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- Month
- October
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Taking as its starting point the 19th-century market gardens of Aubervilliers, Paris, and tracing the legacies of colonial expansion, agricultural development and trade routes, Orlow’s research makes visible a network of connections that underpin food production today. Within the context of artistic engagements with ecological breakdown and colonial exploitation, his research distinctively focuses on agricultural systems of food production and their entanglement with colonial legacies, historical trade routes, and contemporary postcolonial relations. Linking local micro histories of industrialisation and urbanisation in an age of ecological crisis, the work moves through documentary form toward experimental exhibition display to starkly expose the discrepancies between the soil we live on and the soil we live from.
The research was supported by: Les Laboratoires Aubervilliers, Tropical Agronomy Garden, National Museum of Natural History, Paris; Senegalese Institute for Agricultural Research, Dakar, amongst others. Research at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris led to interviews with stakeholders in Europe and West Africa that feature in the monograph. Soil Affinities has been exhibited at multiple venues, and in 2020 was developed for Critical Zones, curated by Bruno Latour at ZKM, Karlsruhe.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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