Review
Suelo
The Ecological Turn
Review By: Alejandra Celedon Forster
September 6, 2024
Through thirteen chapters, Francisco Díaz’s new book Suelo invites us to reflect on the multiple meanings of the Spanish word suelo, which stands for ground, land, soil, earth, and even floor. Díaz argues that suelo is also an abstract space that allows control, calculation, financial speculation, and geopolitical strategies. The book makes visible soil conditions as the material layer on which buildings sit and humans stand.
Suelo is the third volume in the series Perdidos en el Espacio (Lost in Space) published by Bifurcaciones in Spanish. Previous volumes include Ruina (ruin) and Jardín (garden) and the forthcoming Ventana (window). The series invites scholars and writers to pursue a topic and unfold it outside the constrictions of a typical journal article. The author had explored the topic before, first as editor of a special issue of ARQ Journal dedicated to “Land” (ARQ 93 Suelos, 2016 Ediciones ARQ published by the School of Architecture of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and through the pedagogical agenda of the master’s program course he led in 2022 at Universidad Católica. If, for the magazine, Díaz translated suelo as land (with an emphasis on urban land issues), this book might be better translated as “ground” while never flattening the complexity of the term.
Díaz uses the ground as a lens (microscopic and telescopic) to discuss critical issues and pose social and political critiques. If architects have drawn the ground as a thick, bold line, the book shows that the ground is everything but inert: it breathes, is alive, and connected. Some chapters zoom in—as Walter Benjamin’s surgeon’s dissections or the cameraman’s closeups—cutting the ground’s thickness into billions of invisible microorganisms. Other chapters zoom out to frame the entire Earth—like Benjamin’s painter’s overview of the canvas or the magician’s act of healing without touching a body; the book also constructs a panorama, the big picture.
Suelo shakes the ground underneath the reader to reveal contemporary urgencies: from the biographical naïve approach of childhood and play—reminding us of a time when we were closer to the ground—to the complex relationships between the land and its cartographies, between the map and the territory, including earth as the support of life. Díaz also takes the reader to “grounds-outside-the-ground,” those in permanent movement (such as boats, plains, or spaceships), remembering that, eventually, the physical, emotional, and material stability depends on the ground.
The book’s structure follows a narrative arc, where just like independent rooms in an enfilade, one must enter the first to follow into the next. The sequence starts with a biographical account, followed by a cartographical chapter with an interscalar approach. From there, two larger chapters follow that foreground suelos as earth. One dwells on microorganisms, on the first 20 cm of sectional distance in the crust of the earth that contains the germ of the life on the planet; the other is dedicated to trees and fungi. The last chapters focus on the social, political, and economic aspects of land. These expose how the drawing of the ground has political intentionality. Díaz’s book contributes to agendas pushed forward by contemporary scholars and artists such as Leopold Lambert’s weaponized cartographies (2012) to
While a map is a drawing of the ground, the book expands on the drawings on the ground. Some of them are physical, such as the lines people trace on beach sand. Others are imaginary, such as meridians and parallels dividing the globe. There are also abstract lines but with profound impact on life, such as the artificial and colonial contours that partitioned African countries, and those that divides zones of conservation from zones of sacrifice.
Trained as an architect, Díaz looks at the ground in plan, but also section. He cuts the geological layers and depths, revealing the ground’s buried treasures. The land is also the surface to hide what is not to be seen, the carpet to conceal secrets under. Díaz reflects on buildings’ hidden foundations below the ground, practices of resource extraction, and the authority, power, and violence that humans have exerted over the planet. An example of violence against the planet is the case of forest monocrops damaging the soil; they only return certain types of nutrients while depleting others.
In a crucial call for care and repair, the first chapters are especially concerned with problems that arise in landscape architecture such as the loss of natural soil or the irreversible damage caused to the Earth’s surface. Suelo shares this agenda with Ana Miljacki’s “Conversations on Care,” launched at the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT in 2019, the Australian Pavilion for La Biennale di Venezia in 2018, created by Baracco+Wright Architects in collaboration with artist Linda Tegg, and Paulo Tavares and Sean Anderson’s conversations “Acts of Repair” (Cornell University, 2021).
Finally, the author concludes with a chapter on the notion of property and use. Díaz follows the problem of land in urban contexts: the question of land value, the ways this value is assigned, the ethics behind land speculation, and the expropriation and population displacements. One key chapter dwells on the fact that a few people can own rights of use, exploitation, and exclusion over portions of planetary soil. Díaz argues that Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ land is the cornerstone of modern states, and that artificial divisions of nature, created by the occidental mainstream approach to the ground, might be responsible for most of the planetary crises.
The book sets forth a social and political critique from the observation of soils, revealing the perverse effects of capitalism and colonialism that have depended on borders, exploitation, and capitalization of the ground by a few. In doing so, Díaz’s kaleidoscopic account of suelos is a crucial reminder that architecture traces the ground with imaginary and material furrows, dividing the public from the private, the interior from the exterior, and the included from the excluded. Paradoxically, the ground we all share is the ground that divides us.
Alejandra Celedon Forster is an architect). She was the curator of the Chilean Pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennale and cocurator of “The Plot: Miracle and Mirage” at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. She is dean at Facultad de Arquitectura, Arte y Diseño at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile.