Soil, Leaves and DustHanna Valle Design Department – Sandberg Institute 2020 There I was, walking again. A thin layer of mist was rifting while my chest and hands were piercing the grey veil. The ground sunk softly under my weight and dirt burst through my toes, making a repressed squeak with every touch. The air was muttering indecipherable syllables and sentences. It didn’t seem to care if there were any possible listeners. There was a perpetual whirring in the dusky evening. When compared to the day before, I didn’t notice any significant changes in the land- scape. Whether there was ever any transformation in it, it was impossi- ble to tell. The landscape was vast and wide, flat as a string stretched on a board. The presence of the horizon was always lingering there, now concealed by the fog, but waiting to be unveiled again. During the mist, the ground seemed to blend seamlessly into the air with its muted tones of grey and brown. When the fog occasionally broke clear for a moment, it was possible to see little speckles of red and lengthy rifts of bright orange gently snaking the surface of the Earth. The rifts were sporadi- cally sighing streams of steam and gassy fumes. You could walk towards the horizon for hours, hoping for a change in the landscape, and still feel you hadn’t moved a dash. It was such an unwelcoming view that it didn’t encourage you to move in the slightest. Stopping, however, wasn’t an option for me. It was very important that I regularly lifted the members of my body. Today, I felt no urgency to hasten, but the murky weather made me feel capricious and I wanted to go faster. The meandering, slow air felt soothing on my dry face. It formed small soggy pebbles on my canopy as I decided to raise the pace. The landscape was so grim and stationary, but its flatness also made me feel taller and more self-assured. There seemed to be nothing else to fill the surroundings besides me. I was patterning my thoughts again, as every day, weaving little maps. It was a hobby, not a routine in the same way as walking, because this kind of mapping always delighted me. “An increased amount of distress rising upwards, sighing echoes from the ground,” I calculated. While patterning the environment, I was also simultaneously inspecting my bodily movements. There was a slight sensation of growing tension around my waist. I tried to stretch my limbs and branches to ease the unpleasant tingling feeling. The increasing stiffness could lead to un- comfortable conditions of a sort I had experienced before. There should be more movement in the following days. Every once in a while, I had to pause for a moment, to halt, despite my fear of stiffness. There were only two different purposes for stopping: the first was eating; the second, vomiting. When I ate, I absorbed abso- lutely everything I could see. In the past, everything around me would disappear down my throat wherever I went: sky-scraping formations of concrete, shiny assemblages of glass and metal, howling cries of explana- tion. Because of this seemingly infinite process of absorption, there were no longer so many dangerous obstacles or hilly tops to stumble over. Adjustments between different speeds of walking were much easier to manage. The never-ending meals and nutrition had made me grow very fast, so that now it was possible to observe quite long distance into the landscape on a clear day. 2 Besides eating, I had to stop to empty myself. To be honest, I actually liked this process better. Vomiting cleaned away the occasionally oc- curring feeling of uneasiness. Spitting saliva and stomach liquids, I was having a conversation with the Earth. In that sense, bowing towards the soil was an exchange process. It was as if all the bad memories, the various obstacles I had tried to digest but couldn’t tolerate, were this way returned to the dirt of the ground in a new, ruminated form. To make it clear for you: I didn’t vomit everything, just the material I couldn’t use for my personal growth. The small critters hurrying and bustling around my feet, occasionally breaking up from the underground and into my sight, could use these leftovers in a much better way than I could. Sometimes when I haphazardly returned to a place I had once stopped to regurgitate, I could see a change in the texture of the ground and greener hues within the dark brown. In these places there was a faint scent of something unfamiliar, which made me pattern all of the different smells within me, and eventually think about the valley. Sometimes I wondered whether the valley was an actual memory or perhaps just a glitch. In this recollection, there was no scents of sul- phur or damp moistness, just artificial emptiness. The odours of the landscape I was currently walking through never resembled this mem- ory. Besides the strange scent, it was hard to remember anything. The memories were difficult to locate, extremely scattered and hazy. There were some bright green spots on the sides of the valley, blurry figures. Impatient chattering, around, rising up and down, the occasional clat- tering of metal touching another hard surface, the soft dragging sound of a fabric. “What was ‘fabric’ again?” I would look into it later. So many terms and memories were lost. It wasn’t anything to be mournful about, though. There was no use in archiving unreliable terms if you didn’t encounter or use them daily. One of the few visual memories I have is the sight of my hand lying beside my body, looking so different to how it does now. My arm shed open from wrist to elbow, the skin curling softly outwards from the flesh. Something shiny was approaching the cut and a small twinge went through my body quickly. A shadow landed on me. This is my last memory of being in a horizontal position. I woke up, now standing in an upwards posture. Though, standing didn’t feel quite like the right term to use for the position, because I was not holding up my body with my own voluntary strength. I was tied to a flowerpot and additional metal sticks were attached to hold me up from the sides. I wanted to howl in protest but only a faint weep came out, as if a small creature was trying to crawl up my throat, clawing my vocal folds in terror. My legs felt uncomfortably moist, unfamiliar. On the surface of the soil on which I was standing was pale, somewhat transparent, yellowish fluid, slowly pushing its way deeper into the black dirt, until it finally disappeared inside of it. I felt terrified. My feet were tightly tied together with a black elastic band. Between my legs, there was no longer any space, only neat stitches crossing from one limb to the other and back again, preventing all movement. This new posture made me feel unbalanced, as if the blood had suddenly escaped my lower body. The ties and stitches made it challenging to move in any imaginable way but it also felt like my bones had abruptly 3 transformed into a more heavy, solid structure. There were more green spots. But were those spots now very close to my thighs? I couldn’t focus my sight. I was positive that the green was now climbing on my leg, growing from me. The soil stayed wet but there were less sticks at my sides. The ties were loosened and I was more or less standing independently on my stitched-together legs, even in my sleep. The lower part of my body felt increasingly heavier, thicker, but the upper parts, waist and chest, still moved flexibly. There were small, external sprigs sprouting from my arms. I was in a deep sleep most of the time and only brief moments of consciousness occurred. My dreams were mostly clouds of colours. Sometimes I woke up to a sense that someone was standing behind me. The familiar metallic clattering sounded like it was coming from a lengthy distance but every so often I could feel the hands attaching something to my back. But the hands weren’t merely working all the time. They stroked other parts, slowly, going too low. I tried to shrink away from the unpleasant touch but my body didn’t obey like it used to, it stayed still. I dozed back to unconsciousness but I couldn’t forget. How did I ever accomplish leaving the valley? The memory was an unclear haze of shrieking voices and rumbling. Dust and smoke flow- ing out of the place, towards a pitch-black sky. I remember the joy of ripping my legs apart. The neat stitches losing their threaded grasp, the satisfaction of running again. It had been a long time since I had seen any of those valleys. I had start- ed to feel safe again. Rarely, I encountered some lonely figures or small groups on my way. I had learned to avoid the few areas with people, and vice versa; they weren’t eager to approach me. I didn’t carry any ill feel- ings towards these creatures. There was a mutual, wordless agreement about the existence of both. Neither of us would disturb the other. I slowed my pace again and rustled my multiplied arms. Someday, I thought, I would stop and let my legs entwine more tightly with the warm soil, voluntarily limit the stretching of my lower body.