Situated Design: Root Polycultures¶
My understanding is that the approach of situated design invites us to embed design into social context. Taking this further, my main motivation in my project Root Polycultures is to embed my design practice into ecological and multispecies networks. In this sense, what resonated with me the most during the Situated Design week was the visit to Cal Negre and the practice of Maria, which inspired me to think about ecological situatedness of materials. Her clay materials are local, and in some of the works she showed us she didn’t try to hide soil materialities such as bones and stones that could be considered “impure”, she incorporated that into her design. That was a strong statement of situatedness to me.
Ecologically, I situate my exploration in a concern for our disconnection with soil in cities. Soil degradation is a problem worldwide, but specifically in cities the situation is worse. I reviewed a recent report of “Soil Vulnerability in Catalunya” and found that in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area the main drivers of soil vulnerability are soil sealing from urbanization and infrastructure, and pollution from extractive activities and landfills. Soil is paved over or polluted. This invisibilization is not only spatial but perceptual. Soils are among the most biodiverse habitats on Earth, hosting vast communities of bacteria, fungi, insects, nematodes, and plant-root networks that sustain terrestrial ecosystems. A significant proportion of terrestrial biodiversity lives below ground. Yet as city dwellers, we rarely acknowledge this living world.
My project is not an abstract theoretical imposition but has emerged from my emotional, sensorial and material connection with soil from Barcelona, and it is still evolving. My first exploration with Echoing Soil (my project of the 1st term) was about creating soil-human entanglements through sound. Understanding how soil organisms communicate not only through chemical interactions but through sound was a key discovery for me, because it stood to reason that my voice (set to the right frequency) could have an impact on the behavior of soil organisms, and for ecological restoration of the soil. A form of communication was possible, one that was based on scientific evidence and emotional engagement. So I created a poem that emerged from my visits to the soil of the communal gardens in Valldaura and my walks in Montjuic, and I played it to the soil organisms. This was my first step for me to stablish a connection with Barcelona soil.
As my thinking evolved, I felt the urge to engage with soil in a more material way. This led me to Root Polycultures, my current project. I was fascinated with the notion that mycelium, bacteria, and plant roots are the architects of the soil, the structure that prevents erosion, but also the biological scaffolding that allows biodiversity to thrive. I wondered what it would be like to make this visible to people above ground. This time my drive is to nurture a healthy entanglement with soil agents by making their biological processes visible. I felt the urge to “help” underground life to climb the surface to remind us that it is sustaining us, not just in a metaphorical way but as a real ecological foundation. This of course can be my own design imposition, but I do believe it is a response to my affective entanglements with soil. Or at least I like to believe is the agency of the soil acting upon me.
Mirroring the role of plant roots as soil architects, I began to imagine growing architecture above ground with them. This is how my project Root Polycultures emerges. Now to do this, I situated myself in the biodesign culture and community, which I’m part of since I have been a member of many collectives of biodesign in Berlin and New York. The logic seems straightforward: look for biodesign protocol to grow textiles with plant roots. And surely enough I found them. But the disconnection of the biodesign world with ecology is something that has bothered me in the past. Biodesign engages with biological and ecological processes but mostly only from an utilitarian perspective.
Aligned with a bigger anthropocentric trend in biodesign, it follows that in standard root textile practices, plants are treated as isolated production units optimized for material output: roots. Life is reduced to a temporary fabrication tool. The promise of working with living systems risks becoming a new threat. A continuity of industrial logics that isolates life and exploits it. Ecology of seeds in this context doesn’t matter too much, it is just background noise to the design practice. Furthermore, plant roots are shaped in geometries that are aesthetic impositions of the designer. And though there is an apparent diversity of geometrical shapes in root textile practices out there, which in part are possible to create fast and cheap enabled by parametric design and 3D printing, the diversity is really a formal illusion, because these geometries do not fundamentally represent cultural diversity.
With Root Polycultures, I want to re-situate roots in plant cycles and multispecies habitats and also re-situate geometries of root plants in relational worldviews that emerge from on-the-ground practices. My exploration is to grow plant habitats for pollinators, encode geometries of care and symbiotic relationships in their root systems, and to assemble soft architectures with harvested root mats. I think at this stage I think of this process as an auto-ethnographic experiment, but after I would like to make it into a participatory project. In this way, I would engage people not only with the aesthetic of roots but with the processes that sustain ecologies. Rather than growing plants solely for material harvest, I want to cultivate habitats that support pollinators. In this shift, roots are not only fibers; they are participants in reciprocal systems. I would allow plants to complete their full life cycle — including flowering to nourish pollinators — before harvesting their roots. Situating seeds into ecologies requires moving from monoculture toward polyculture. After all life is diversity. Instead of relying on a single optimized species for root efficiency, I imagine combining structural species such as wheatgrass; and local ecological companions such as clover.
I am aware that a big part of situated design is to commit to a geographically bounded place. I think I’m not fully there yet. As I said in the beginning, the problem of soil vulnerability is what moved me in the first place. I feel like a logical place to ground my project would be a degraded or polluted land patch in Barcelona. But I’m not feeling myself completely rooted in Barcelona, so I think emotionally for me it makes sense to look for places of biocultural hope. Places that already show symbiotic alliances between people and soil communities, where I can feel inspired, supported and nurtured as well. That is why I conducted my first experiments of EchoingSoil in the communal garden of Valldaura and why now I want to work in an urban garden in Barcelona. Currently I’m planning to visit the urban garden next to Akasha Hub and one near Arc de Triumph where I live. Urban gardens might not seem the best representation of soil vulnerability. But maybe that’s not the right criteria for me at this stage. I rather see them as places with healthy soil, plant, pollinators and human entanglements. These relationships would be a good compost base to create new ethics of working with plant roots. To re-learn what it means to be a biodesigner in places of ecological care.
When I think in the collective human dimension, that again I would like to explore in the future as right now I am on a more auto-ethnographic phase, I feel that urban gardens could be a good point of encounter for people that already work with soil and plants in urban gardens and biodesign people that work with living organisms but confined in labs to weave together their stories, past entanglements and write new ethics and stories of crafting soft architectures with plant roots. I think it would be interesting to bring all the aspects that are taken for granted in the design protocol to create root textiles into an open dialogue and negotiation into the context of the urban garden. Everything from the selection of seeds to crafting of geometries could take a whole different social-ecological meaning in the set up of an urban garden. Seeds could be local from the garden and selection of plants could follow the existing ecology and presence of pollinators. And the geometries would become a binding logic that symbolizes a worldview on the making.
Geometry is never neutral. It carries cultural, political, and ecological assumptions. In dominant Western design traditions, geometry often reflects ideals of symmetry, efficiency, optimization, and standardization. Modern architecture, but also agriculture treats geometry as an abstract, universal, and value-neutral tool for control. Grids and lines are everywhere. I want to situate geometries as tools to diagram multispecies relationships. In this case, I am inspired by Andean and Amazonian indigenous visual cultures where geometries embody a relational cosmology. So in this sense, I position myself in my own visual heritage, but I don’t want to fall into the trap of pattern appropriation. Rather than reproducing Indigenous geometries as visual patterns, I want to learn from the way these geometries operate as relational systems that encode cosmology. My exploration would be creating -first alone and then in a participatory way- geometries as multispecies semiotics that tell stories of time, reciprocity, cycles and interdependence. Digital-fabricated geometries would encode stories of multispecies coexistence and shape root growth patterns. Root mats would be harvested and assembled into soft architectures, as material memories of living ecologies.