Bending, spilling, dumping. Soil, rural resistance, and queer futurity.

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This practice-led DPhil proposal will explore orientations and inclinations towards the soil, investigating urban- western relationships to subsistence, rural life, and soil politics. Following tactics developed by minoritarian social movements including peasant practices, farmers' riots and queer culture and theory, this project reorients Western urban relations to subsistence. This project departs from a place of urgency and foregrounds, through a focus on corporeality, the experiences of oppressed bodies. It also centers on subjugated histories and overlooked sites including Southern Mediterranean European farming communities that use protest as a tool for survival. These orientations are given precedence in calls for ecological change and transformations in human-soil relations. The project asks how we might reorient ourselves by learning from agricultural movements and queer phenomenology, finding alignment between queer activism and stewardship of the land. Through the development of sculptures and performances, this project will develop forms of solidarity that trespass the usual complexities of an urban-rural divide, offering hypotheses towards future forms of coexistence functioning as modes of action that resist necropolitical regimes by recruiting advocates for the soil. How can acts of resistance draw on vulnerability? This project challenges models of subjectivity that represent the ethical and active agent as erect and "upright," asking: What can we learn from inclining and bending? From bending towards each other and the land? I will research voices and material gestures that arrive from rural sites of hopelessness in the web of food production, with foods understood as political forms. This builds on previous research conducted in Southern Spain where small-holding agricultural farmers, historical peasants, and their ways of living are forced out by centralised market forces.The research proposed here also employs queer thinking and its embodiment as a way to expand on and chart a way out of dominant, privileged, hallowed ways of living. It sets out to 'reorient,' making things queer and disturbing the order of things (Ahmed 2006). Transition (Preciado 2018) and separation (Tsing 2016) are seen as ways to combat and disorientate worldviews that foreclose the possibility of a future where "the word for world is soil" (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Ideas drawn from Spanish rural essayist Jaime Izquierdo (2020), who argues for a useful historical entanglement of peasantry and landscape, guide the project in moving beyond current eco-urban critiques of farming and eco-bourgeois appropriations of the rural. The project emerges from an earth wound, creating alliances between soil workers who bend down to seed and harvest and queer bodies bowing towards ground and death. The forms of solidarity that arise trespass the usual complexities and divides, offering future forms of coexistence as modes of action that resist necropolitical regimes by recruiting advocates for the soil.The project will include a series of talks, fieldwork and installations, taking as a departure point certain forms of decelerated life and embodiments developed out of precedents from farming communities. Guiding precedents include works and archival images from Derek Jarman, Pepe Espaliu, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres whose embodied proximity to the earth as they incline toward death brought on by AIDS will be recruited as a mode of embodied knowledge offering insight into the gradual composting of life into terrain. Both communities-those of land stewards and those of queer artists-resist forced (and enforced) rectitude (Tsing, 2016), transforming vulnerability into fortitude and bending and inclining into resistance. Slowing-down activities such as the siesta, still common in Southern Europe, will be explored as speculative devices exercised physically and sculpturally to deactivate architectures of hyper-productivity.