Soil Politics investigates soil as a political material, which has been mobilised as an environmental laboratory to enable the transition from colonial forms of power towards late liberal governance. From the perspective of what I term “soil politics,” colonisation operates through the land, and continues to materialise in the present with the modification of soil’s chemical properties. In particular, I focus my research project on the global soil surveys initiated after the Second World War by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as a defining moment in the transformation of land from earthly matter into a techno-scientific assemblage, invested with the capacity to unsettle and reorganise modes of life. Through a combined analysis of cartographic and archival sources, interviews, and field work, I examine the consequences of the implementation of the surveys’ directives at different scales, to inquire in the present-day what the Soil Map of the World represents when experienced from the ground.
This research was initiated as a PhD project at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London.
João Prates Ruivo is an architect whose research focuses on the technoscientific transformations of soils. João studied architecture in Lisbon at Instituto Superior Técnico, where he was a student of Professor Manuel Vicente. After working in Rotterdam with Theo Deutinger and at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.), he moved to Athens to found his own practice FORA, with whom he collaborated until 2017.
In the UK, João has taught Genealogies of the City at Syracuse University London, studio in the School of Architecture University of Liverpool, and research studio at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. Together with George Ridgway, João is currently leading the Alentejo Research Unit, a research studio in Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art, focused on the environmental transformation of Alentejo under super-intensive monocrop.
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