Project by Shannon Levkovitz @shannonlevart
In Newtown Creek, soil is not passive ground but a charged and breathing archive—where industrial catastrophe, environmental policy, and intimate life converge. This project repositions soil as an active agent in the urban metabolism of a Superfund site long marked by the 1970 spill of 30 million gallons of oil. Spanning 45 city blocks, the Meeker Avenue Plume continues to emit toxic vapors (TCE, PCE, heavy metals) into homes, severing residents from the microbial life once integral to environmental health. In response, the EPA’s sub-slab depressurization systems render soil inert, further alienating bodies from the ground beneath them. Through a tripartite intervention—at industrial, communal, and domestic scales—Choreographies of Soil Kinship proposes an alternative mode of engagement: one that transforms remediation from sterile containment into embodied care. At the industrial threshold, fences become porous corridors where biosolids, rainwater, and air reintroduce microbial life into the soil—forming a social soil marketplace. In communal zones, playgrounds are rewilded into bio-training grounds, inviting intergenerational contact with living mounds of earth. In domestic spaces, HVAC systems are retooled to integrate soil-harvesting baskets and grow chambers, turning sweat, moisture, and microbial traces into cycles of cultivation. Clothing, floors, and interiors become performative surfaces—soft infrastructures for microbial attunement. By choreographing microbial, material, and bodily exchanges across scales, this project reimagines contaminated ground not as a space of exile, but as a site for renewed kinship. Design here does not seal us off from risk—it teaches us how to live with and care for a damaged world.
