Installation commissioned for 5th Istanbul Design Biennial
“Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one”

Stoniness, then, is not in the stone’s ‘nature’, in its materiality. Nor is it merely in the mind of the observer or practitioner. Rather, it emerges through the stone’s involvement in its total surroundings – including you, the observer – and from the manifold ways in which it is engaged in the currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, in short, are not attributes but histories.
[Materials against materiality by Tim Ingold in Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1) 1–16, 2007 Cambridge University Press]

The word Earthable is derived from the verb ‘to earth’. Earthable—also an earth table, belongs to a world where materials are verbs, things occur rather than exist. Not dissimilar to our planet—should you, for example, look at a tree from a tree’s points of view. 

Earthable is a setting of a table and six chairs as an occurrence blurring the anthropomorphic inventions and descriptions such as a table, agricultural field, garden, plant pot, nature-morte, sprouting, soil and similar. It consists of trillions of living bacteria, nematodes, protozoa and kilometers of mycorrhiza. Earthable will partake in worldly processes of ongoing generation and regeneration throughout the Biennial by interacting with the pollens, the sun, people who will join the processes of formation. The conversation of soil is carried with Anadolu Meraları who engage in regenerative agriculture and called themselves repairers. The soil in flux was kindly donated by the Equinox Farm in Istanbul. At the end of the exhibition Earthable was moved to Gate 27 where it continues its cycles.

Earthable triggers an encounter with soil, a ‘thing’ in flux in contrast to the anthropocentric and utilitarian perception as an useful medium to be benefited from for growing food and onto which to build shelter. Earthable physically contemplates an instance of an unprivileged status for our species where habitation and design are described as joining forces of the world’s flows and energies.

Curatorial team: Mariana Pestana, Billie Muraben, Sumitra Upham
Photos: Kayhan Kaygusuz, Selen Erkal, Ra
Design Assistant: Seda Baydur