Emma Camille Barreto: Soil Citizens

Our planet is currently experiencing its sixth episode of human-induced mass extinction, leading to a decline in up to forty percent of all insect species. As we witness this catastrophic deterioration of life, it is crucial to preserve sensorial methods for identifying the natural world around us, and pass these methods on to amateur enthusiasts, autodidacts, and citizen scientists as a means for coping with climate crisis. “Soil Citizens” seeks to explore the immensely biodiverse population of soil-dwelling organisms residing in the soils of Athens and create a clear method for self-taught field education.

Soil mesofauna is comprised of detritivores and decomposers that inhabit the soil’s surface and play a critical role in breaking down dead and decaying organic matter, transforming it into nutrients. Despite their significant contribution to soil health and agriculture, they are scantily researched by the professional scientific community. However, a strong underbelly of self-taught experts and insect devotees exists in the sea of internet forums and social media groups. Tapping into the guerilla field-collecting methods of these groups, a preliminary survey of springtails, mites, myriapods, and other soil invertebrates will be conducted and displayed in a makeshift laboratory. The research further aims to reveal the radical democratization of knowledge that happens through self-teaching and the importance of whim and wonder guiding scientific learning that scholarly institutions may otherwise deem irrelevant.

My research took quite a different form than I had anticipated – I spent much more time developing edges and intersections rather than working towards actions or solutions. The intersection I’m referring to is where scientific inquiry and personal intimacy converge, and where the voices of nonhuman life are not only observed, but recorded and speculatively extended. The study of insect physiology/identification, behavior, and communication was not undertaken as a passive accumulation of knowledge, but as a deliberate restructuring of how we value, document, and commune with the natural world.

There exists a learned aversion in certain organisms – particularly insects – rooted in aesthetics, fear, and a long history of hierarchical thinking (with a tiny bit of evolutionary instinct, which I and others may have been spared from). In my research, I attempted to dissolve these aversions through presence, proximity, and rigorous attention. The daily act of seeking out insect life throughout the parks and grass patches of Athens, of constructing spaces in the studio where their behaviors could emerge naturally, and of documenting each interaction in exhaustive detail, was not simply data collection – it was an act of love, noticing, and care. To write down the nuances of an isopod’s gait or memorialize the life of a worm is to assert that this life was lived and therefore deserves a history.

Histories, especially those constructed around animals, are often linear, clinical, and divorced from emotion. But what if evolutionary lineage was written like oral tradition? What if the archive of a species mirrored that of a family – messy, storied, and full of contradiction? My installation for Open Days sought to collapse the rigid frameworks that separate animal documentation from human history – to create a speculative living space of a tiny apartment in Athens, not much different than the many I moved in and out of as I wandered the city. In my little corner of the working space, the tools of the naturalist – specimen drawers, field notes, taxonomies – became, in my hands, tools of speculation, storytelling, and emotional resonance. I am interested in continuing to build speculative archives for animal life: ones that allow space for the undocumented, the subjective, and the unknowable.

The other side of the research, arguably one of the most important for a topic that can be perceived as almost clinical and void of creativity, was my methodology. The acknowledgement that my pursuit is not solitary. My methodology is informed by autodidacts, outliers, and those who have chosen curiosity as their guide over institutional validation. There is a radical freedom in the work of community naturalists and self-taught entomologists, a deep love that drives their inquiry, and it is this model of passionate, non-hierarchical research that shapes the philosophical underpinning of my own process. Before leaving Los Angeles for Athens, I arranged an online meeting with a photographer whose social media and contributions to a Facebook group we both occupy I had long admired. What I imagined would be a generic Q&A session about photography techniques turned into a fiery two-hour call, just completely gushing about collection methods, our shared love for springtails and other soil organisms, and how we balance this passion with our day jobs. My guiding light became this idea that knowledge can be made in kitchens, forests, forums, and message boards – after work, during your lunch break, on your day off – spaces and times where expertise is not gatekept, but dispersed freely.

To observe animals is not simply to watch, but to enter into a relationship. Relationship requires responsibility; I attempted to create spaces where animals are not just studied but invited to express, communicate, and co-create; through sound, film, or drawing, I offered sites where the insects could have spoken back. These media acted as portals through which interspecies kinship can be felt, not just understood. And then I took them back to the ponds and parks and coordinates I picked them up from, and I imagine they just continued their own lives.

There was no singular conclusion, no unified theory built. What emerged was a scaffolding of questions, a growing, ever-shifting archive of interspecies intimacies. By writing, recording, memorializing, and cohabiting, I want to build new structures for knowledge – ones that honor closeness over distance, affection over objectivity, and curiosity over control.