«Beneath our feet is a miracle», writes the award-winning Guardian columnist, essayist and environmental activist George Monbiot, for the opening act of Ossigeno 12. But if we cannot know the reasons for miracles for they are supernatural, nothing is more natural than the soil, which we do not know only because of our guilty neglect. Between data and enchantment, Monbiot tells us that miracle of life and vitality that is soil.
Like his Renaissance namesake, a great artist at the court of the Este family, Lorenzo Costa paints new morphologies by shaping the soil with water. An Italian pioneer of permaculture, his practice responds to three imperatives – to slow down, to distribute, to infiltrate – by listening to and respecting the land of Chianti and cultivating, like his fellow countryman Leonardo, the spark of experimentation.
There are some founding myths that, though distant from us in time and latitude, are still able to point the way. The model of the chinampas descends from Mexica-Aztecan mythology, generating soil from water and, through the work of associations such as Arca Tierra, connecting the biblical narrative of the Promised Land to the rhizomatic reality of the urban jungle.
Yesterday an academic background in Agricultural Sciences, today one of the most acclaimed artists on the international scene. Ossigeno 12 met Carsten Höller, who took us on a path - the one of his unmistakable imagery - to investigate the shelter offered by his art both to the human right to the land, and to the sacrosanct rights of the land.
What does the philosophical principle of intergenerational justice mean? We asked one of its noble fathers, the philosopher and professor Alberto Pirni, to find out how it fertilely grafts not only onto the abstract concept of morale, but also onto the concrete reality of the soil, in terms of sustainability and responsibility in the consumption of resources. Revolutionizing the alibi of Enough.
The 2015 documentary Tomorrow is the antidote to the apocalyptic, dead-end scenarios daily produced by the media as a conditioned reflex to the ringing of the environmental crisis bell. In a road movie that stops at virtuous examples discovered at every latitude of the planet, answers such as urban gardens, permaculture and composting are already here, germinating in the ground.
C’è più vita in un cucchiaio da tavola riempito di terra, che nella totalità di esseri umani che abitano il pianeta. Ossigeno 12 ospita Emanuele Isonio di Re Soil Foundation, ente scientifico no profit, per dare autorevole voce alla vastissima vitalità del suolo, violato nello strappo dall’agricoltura sostenibile all’agroindustria intensiva, perché ciò che accade di sopra cura la salute del mondo di sotto ma, soprattutto, viceversa.
Regeneration as rebirth, where the added value lies in the absolute absence of fatigue required. Regenerative agriculture, which gives the soil total freedom to flourish again in accordance with its natural times and ways, thinks beyond the soil and embraces the entire ecosystem. After all, the foundation of its thinking lies right in the layers of the soil, called horizons; the sustainable horizon of our future lies, then, in fertile idleness.