Soil Assembly - Johanna Seelemann

2025 — Soil Assembly

Soil Assembly is a multidisciplinary exploration into the slow, foundational world beneath our feet. Initiated through conversations with farmers and soil scientists, the project began as a response to the urgent issues of soil degradation, food production, and ecological responsibility. It has since evolved into a broader investigation of time, regeneration, and design's role in reshaping human perspectives.

Operating across the intersection of design, animation, and sound, Soil Assembly begins with the understanding that soil and humans exist on vastly different timelines. While we operate in biological time, soil moves in geological time. When soil is new, it’s a hundred years old. But when we’re new, we’re a couple of second old. What appears static to us is, in fact, in constant, invisible transformation—a living place teeming with microorganisms, water flows, and nutrient cycles. We are inseparable from all other organisms. We are rooted in the landscape. And only possible through landscape.

The research centers on Iceland, where new soil is still forming through the gradual weathering of volcanic matter. Soil degradation is widespread, following a history of deforestation and overgrazing. With access to geothermal and hydro energy, Iceland also presents an opportunity: closed-loop, soil-detached cultivation systems that produce human food without exhausting the land. Freeing the land for soil restoration informed the development of diegetic prototypes that care for, rather than extract from, the land.

Designed in close dialogue with Fiona Raby, the objects are machines of vanguard: slow, multigenerational tools for soil regeneration. One typology moves across the landscape over a hundred years, excluding human interference and redirecting the efforts of a mechanized culture toward soil restoration.

Another consists of massive bodies of stone and mineral, placed within the landscape as monuments and nourishment. Composed of parent-material layers, they dissolve into the ground over decades and are ecologically distributed.

Alongside sound designer Áskell Harðarson, a sonic journey was created—tracing the genesis of soil through lava, ice, winds and water. Sounds for each object are designed to soothe both humans and the ecosystem. Three of the eight objects are brought into motion through animations, realized by Felix Hobrücker, setting the designs into geological time.

Soil Assembly proposes a shift in design thinking — entering unimaginable planetary time, more-than-human worlds beyond human lifespans. Through sound, form, and narrative, it challenges how we relate to the land, offering a vision where machines are not exploiting, but custodians of the soil.

The project is a study of language, that explores something which is a set of values. How do we think broader than our human perspective? How many languages are there for an object designed to safeguard and care?

Concept, Design, Development