Earth Is Dangerous

Recently I overheard a bus driver at the main bus terminal in Split characterize a box containing soil inhabited by the mycelium of a fungus too dangerous an item to take on the journey from Split to Sarajevo. No type of substrate, he explained, nor plants are allowed to cross the border between the EU and non-EU states, in this case between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, without a special permit. A simple anecdote about soil used to grow plant species reveals it as a material that constitutes a legally contained, strictly designated, and politically controlled part of planet Earth. A true specimen of our geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where Earth’s soils, along with ever larger numbers of its human population fleeing wars and climate disasters, are declared dangerous subjects. Following an artful negotiation between the owner of the box and the driver, the latter finally accepted the box, along with the money in return for his service to take the dangerous item across the border. From that moment on, the dangerous material starts its journey, with the potential to endanger other humans and non-humans, and intersperse with some alien soil on the Bosnian sovereign territory.

This part of the planet, as others elsewhere before it, has already been rendered hazardous. Beyond its material substance – composing incredible landforms, inhabited by cultures of microbes – it used to, and still does, embody the traumatised Gaia of complex relations enacted and deposited by the most recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 1992 and 1996. In wartime, earth was constantly being displaced and relocated, with paradoxical intentions: cherished, dug up, turned over, trenched, blown up, contaminated, sold, all the while being invoked as a Mother, by all. These were times when human body, through mixed instincts of destruction and survival, was going through an intensified relationship-building with the Earth, one of accelerated passage between, and intermingling of, life and death. An anthropocentric perspective would define this landscape as one of loss, emotional void, and tragedy of war. But in the aftermath of bomb explosions causing injury and death to living organisms, from the perspective of the soil, bodies and other fragments of the Earth would simply re-incorporate, creating new soil and new life.

The inventory of soils traumatised during the war in Bosnia represents a matrix generated by an autonomous process of the archiving of human activities of destruction and survival. It exists in the form of a process of layered contaminations that can offer only a speculative reading of the morphology of soils that had been subject to military interventions. Soil is a living material, as established by the Russian geomorphologist Vasily Vasilyevich Dokuchayev[1] in 1898, who was focusing on nature-based soil classifications and viewed soil as the result of interaction between climate, bedrock, and organisms. In the case of Bosnia, I have attempted to name a variety of newer soil types, such as for example ‘mine soil,’ which contains ordnance that remains unexploded to this day, more than 25 years after the war ended. Another soil type I could identify, is one produced by bomb explosions twenty years ago, when ground particles were dispersed repeatedly, creating new geological layers. In addition, there has been a series of specific human interactions with the soil during wartime, such as growing food in parks and other protected green surfaces.

An accurate classification of soils affected by war activities, I argue, is impossible. Before we begin to perform an analysis and, furthermore, make an inventory of soils contaminated during the war and after, we would need to make an inventory of all kinds of weapons and ammunition that landed on the Bosnian territory. As written in a report by a United Nations Security Council Commission of Experts (1994), the besieging forces of the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA), successors to the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), started their operations by changing the natural landscape. These changed landscapes, including the matrix of unclassified soil types mentioned above, continue to contaminate—not only at the scale of this region, but at the scale of the planet. In 1992 the city of Sarajevo was besieged and for four years suffered countless bombings, artillery and sniper rifle gunfire, and tank attacks. According to Sarajevo: Survival Guide (FAMA, 1993), entrenched along the natural landscape of the surrounding hills and mountains of the city were 260 tanks, 120 mortars, and innumerable anti-aircraft cannons, sniper rifles, and other smaller arms. Parts of neighbourhoods within the city, such as Grbavica and Dobrinja, were divided, meaning the front line cut through and in between the buildings, or meandered along the river Miljacka, temporarily folding opposite river banks together, banks that earlier in the war had been separated and weaponized, either for defence or for waging attacks.

In futile and unhappy times, when destruction exceeds construction, in the middle of elementary chaos, when underground passions roar violently and destructively, the precious pictures of “earthly towns” go either to the sky or under the ground!?

Sabahudin Špilja: "Attempts at (War) Reading the Town," Warchitecture, 1993, p. 23

Warfare clearly defines the geographies of war, but also post-war landscapes, leaving toxic particles, heavy metals, and other traces in the ground behind. As Seth Denizen points out, warfare is but one from a list of patterns produced by humans that imbue the soil with “a new set of possibilities for the production of the geological present.”[3] Next to warfare on his list are “burials, urbanisation, landscaping, architecture, and recreation”[4]. I would go further in detailing this list, singling out the practices of deforestation, mineral mining, production of wastelands, intensive and GMO agriculture, and proliferation of military training facilities – all of them intervening deep within, and altering the very consistency of, ‘nature.’ Un-war Space Lab’s research film comparing the militarisation of Lithuanian woods and the Croatian island of Brač during the last 50 years offers findings of some repercussive effects of such protracted and entangled processes.

In 2010, at first as part of my doctoral studies at the Faculty of Architecture IUAV in Venice, then during post-doctoral research at TU Delft, I started researching wartime destruction of Sarajevo, focusing on the citizens’ survival techniques by adopting cross-media research methods where human experience of attempts at undoing [the effects of] war was at the centre of the research. I realized during the initial years of the research that my own experience of living during the war became an integral part of the research. So far I have collected a variety of media documents produced during the war: drawings, magazines, photographs, films, video recordings and citizens’ private photos, as well as oral histories of those who lived in Sarajevo during the war. Fragments of this work have been presented on various occasions, starting with the digital experiment of the Un-war Space Archive, then through the making of an itinerary exhibition while presenting Un-war Space Device – a portable archive of war documents and Un-war Lexicon, curated by Ana Dana Beroš in 2018.

In 2018/2019 I founded Un-war Space Lab, a fluid collective composed of architects, archaeologists, artists, film makers, media scholars, botanists, musicians, and sound artists, each time reassembled in a different configuration in accordance with the topic of investigation. Un-war Space Lab continues to be a cross-media research-based practice on material transformations of rivers, land, architecture, and interspecies societies, during as well as in the aftermath of war. In 2020, in collaboration with the archaeologist Damir Ugljen, we initiated an open research process entitled Toxic Lands through which we continue to expose the destruction and pollution of the Neretva river and the city of Mostar during and after the war, while including also other soils and rivers in our research process.

Under the most recent period of warfare in Bosnia, the geological present was identified as, and located within the concept of, a ‘landscape of change’. As defined in the Un-war Lexicon, the research lexicon on the consequences of war destruction published and showed within the Un-war Space Device exhibitions (2018-2019), this represents a landscape condition of constant displacement of soil and other natural resources – both for the military purposes of warfare and for the creation of infrastructures of safety for the benefit of civilians. ‘Landscape of change,’ as it was coined, refers to a very specific set of land use pattern changes in the city of Sarajevo itself and the surrounding hills. It describes a diverse repertory of far-reaching physical transformations: digging of trenches for military and civilian use, creation of “accidental cemeteries'' (Sabahudin Špilja, Warchitecture, 1993) in the comparatively safer areas of the city, urban gardens for food production, construction of defence walls out of plastic bags filled with dirt and gravel, and construction of an underground tunnel underneath the Sarajevo airport as the only passageway out of the city under siege. In response to military violence, new societal codes of behaviour but also social instincts and dreams initiated the landscape of change, defining and activating new positions within the landscape of cultural and architectonic materials (Armina Pilav, ed. Ana Dana Beroš, p.6).

Almost two decades after the war officially ended, displacements and contaminations of the soil continue in a variety of hidden modes that only become apparent through diseases that affect and intervene on human and nonhuman bodies, through the agency of toxic metals and chemicals, the index of their origins still rendered visible in the form of open trenches and bunkers that remain in the forests, around villages, and at the outskirts of cities. Military waste is often found as remnants of weaponry, unexploded ammunition in uncleared minefields and riverbeds, as in the case of the Neretva river, or exploded bullets and shrapnel embedded in tree trunks, cobblestone pavements, and architecture. According to the Bosnia and Herzegovina Mine Action Center, “the current size of the suspected mine risk area in B&H is 956.36 km2 or 1.96% of the total area of ​​B&H.” They also note that “the current size of the suspected dangerous area [containing] cluster munitions in B&H is 2.05 km2.” Most of the sites containing mines are to be found in rural areas whose population remains at disproportionate risk.

In the same time period while the war officially was ending with the Dayton Agreement (1995-1996), Bosnian artist Alma Suljević introduced into our artistic and cultural venues various mine items in their original appearance and form, ready to explode, or as various material interpretations of their original forms, such as in her artwork ‘Minka’.

These mines live hidden in a time of supposed peace. These mines live hidden in innocent nature, but only as long as they are not stepped on by innocent beings. They are someone’s product; someone ‘planted’ them with the intention to kill. They are the brainchild and product of the male world.

Curator Dunja Blažević on the 'Minka' artwork

Suljević has also explored landscapes of change and soil containing unexploded ammunition in mine suspected areas, searching for mines while participating in demining actions along with other deminers, fully equipped as the rest of them. This same equipment was used by Alma in her performances about the continued presence and danger of mines, in Bosnia and internationally. Besides mines that during wartime presented direct and imminent threat, Alma draws attention to how, from the onset of Bosnia’s post-war period, the violence of war has continued to this day, enacted through the lingering presence of mines against the environment and its inhabitants – as an implosive and slow violence against all: forests, lands, rivers, rocks, plants that get eaten or not, by human and other-than-human species. Since the beginning of her practice, Alma’s work has been delivering an important message that all these subjects are one – cultivated toxic lands surrounding actual mines, their remnants, iron and chemical compounds, plants’ roots, human and other-than-human bodies.

We breathe, eat, and drink heavy metals because unexploded and exploded ammunitions obtain their power by leaving traces within the earth that finally colonise our bodies through contamination, adding new agents to our biopolitical identities. Human bodies participating in the war, being soldiers or civilians, from the very beginning of the war, with the experiences of the first sirens, bullets or bomb explosions begin to change in both a political and a material sense, while becoming an individual and a collective survival body at once. The survival body formed during the war continues to exist after the war through the cellular memory of the sounds of war, pain experienced from weaponry, loss of family or friends.

That the Earth itself is dangerous implies traumatic processes that change the integrity of species, and the processes of speciation through the creation of toxic lands. They prove that “trauma is a body” – on a geological scale. Toxic lands, as living landscapes, day by day expose the geotrauma, as theorized by Nick Land: ”an ongoing process whose tension is continually expressed - partially frozen - in biological organization” (Fanged Noumena, Collected Writings 1987-2007, Barker Speaks, 2012, pp. 499). It goes beyond the standard definition of species as living organisms that exchange genes and reproduce. ‘Species’ here incorporates the inorganic extensions of the living species: the prostheses made of pollution and technologies of war, connecting human and other-than-human bodies with their own waste, samples of designed substrates that make politically controlled lands, resulting in hybrids of the living and the non-living. In her book In Catastrophic Times (2015, pp. 20), Isabelle Stengers points out: “in this new era, we are no longer only dealing with a nature to be protected from the damage caused by humans, but also with a nature capable of threatening our modes of thinking and living for good.”

There are numerous urgent questions demanding our attention, and they will very soon be unavoidable to all – both men in power and those who serve them – concerning which toxic lands, whose traumas are in the process of becoming. If we all do inhabit the same planet Earth, an Earth of expanding, engulfing toxicity brought on by wars and their aftermaths, and climate change effects? Is that Earth finally becoming equally dangerous – or does it continue to be unequally dangerous – to all? Cellular memory is processing these questions in our very present, continuing past war destructions, and introducing different survival techniques for human and other-than-human species. It recalls the shortages of drinking water and water in general, the vulnerability of access to essential food items, triggered by the journals just this past year, spreading the news that the price of cooking oil and grains is sure to increase.

[1] The first scientific classification of soils was made by Vasily Vasilyevich Dokuchayev, a Russian geomorphologist and early soil scientist who did soil surveys throughout most of Russia.

[2] Image taken from FAMA Collection's interactive Survival Map 1992–1996 that illustrating how the city of Sarajevo with the surroundings became, in Sabahudin Špilja's original English phrasing, an "earthly town."