Jordsans – at regenerere en jordlig omsorg

Through an eco-aesthetic analysis, this article investigates how the visual artist and speculative designer Maria Viftrup’s exhibition Jordsans (Sense of Soil) addresses the ecological crisis. Drawing on Marìa Puig de la Bellacasa’s concept of soil care and Jane Bennett’s concept of onto-Sympathy, we explore how sensuous encounters with soil may foster more attentive and caring human-soil relations, cultivated through practices of touch, speculative thinking, and embodied sensitivity. It is argued that Viftrup’s exhibition engages the audience in rethinking their entanglement with the diverse, multi-species network that constitutes the living soil. With reference to Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology, we critically discuss how the exhibition potentially risks romanticizing or visually fetishizing the soil and thereby constitutes a distance to its critical condition. We suggest that the challenge lies in finding a subtle balance between crisis-induced despair and the hope of transformation. In doing so, our article highlights how Viftrup’s exhibition can contribute to regenerating more attentive, caring and sensible earthly practices, offering aesthetic and sensuous spaces for imagining alternative futures. In that way, Jordsans makes an important attempt to reapproach the soil we have become estranged from.