collective performative action
(August 15, 2026 - ongoing)
Association Terra Solta
Porto, Portugal
Substrata activation event took place on the 15 of August, 2026, on the top of a hill, just behind Capela de S. José / Centro Juvenil de Campanhã, at the community garden of association-movement Terra Solta. Terra Solta is a grassroots community association, focusing on environmental education, volunteering, and community gathering. It operates as a little, hidden island of nature in the middle of the city and is an unique, inclusive microcosm, which kindly agreed to collaborate and host the event exploring the practice of eco-grief. This gathering symbolically marked the last public event of Terra Solta, during which we said farewell to this unique and wonderful place. Due to the construction works for the high-speed rail line, Terra Solta had to move to a new location, and August 2026 was it’s last month in the Campanhã neighbourhood.
𝓢𝓾𝓫𝓼𝓽𝓻𝓪𝓽𝓪
Grief is a layered emotion. It sits within the human mind just like strata in ancient rock formations, marking the depth of the deep time in Siccar Point. Grief is felt personally and takes different shapes. Like Substrata, for some it feels dry and frail like limestone. For others, it is viscous and dense like dirt in a swamp. For many, it is soft like clay that can be shaped. For most, it is hard and rigid like a rock formation. For a few, it reflects light in gemstone colours like a mineral. For some, it is fluid, like water… Nevertheless, for everyone, it is a transient material that changes, that transcends its current state through time, and that becomes something else. Like hot, active, ever-changing compost. It is a dermis layer under the skin of Gaia.
Substrata is the underground. Not the distant one, not the mythical Hades, from where Persephone comes once a year with the rebirth of life, fertility and the promise of Spring. Not that one. The earthy one, just below the grass, just below the pavement of the street which we walk every day on the way to the grocery store. The layer two centimetres below the strata of the Anthropocene. The one where telluric beings reside. Where the chthonic ones live. Where the white, ghostly roots hold on to the soil and onto the time they have been gifted here on Earth, caressed by the soft, moist, shimmering bodies of decomposers. It is a host for all kinds of life.
Inspired by Donna Haraway ideas, Substrata builds on the concept of a compost—messy entanglements, multiple perspectives, not only human. A place to assimilate, to transcend, and to transform something strongly felt but unidentified, employing all possible kinds of being and all kinds of feeling.
A society imagined as a hot, shimmering compost—we require each other in unexpected collaborations and entanglements, and Substrata is a place to explore the possibilities. A soil layer made of uncategorised, unrecognised emotions like eco-grief. Amalgamated, decomposing, decaying matter, transcendent, transforming, mutating into something new, nurturing what already exists, what already lives. As Haraway suggests, not individual, not alone, making oddkin, in the hot compost sub-level in action, in a million actions at the same time. Taking example from telluric beings, bound to the soil, mortal, interconnected inhabitants of the dirt (including plants, fungi, worms, burrowing animals and… humans). No, we have never been floating, superior rulers "above" nature (anthropocentrism). Just like any rodent, plant, spider, earthworm or centipede, we are biological creatures physically bound to the soil, entirely dependent on the Earth's natural systems in order to stay alive. We become with each other, our individual griefs become something else together, something collective, a new bond. Only by doing, only after doing, can we see what it will become, as we cannot know in advance or control the outcome . Substrata , like the subconscious of the mind, talks in code if it talks at all. Substrata is smelled (the moist and cold odour of a deep well on a hot summer day), Substrata is felt on the skin (the cooling, humid sensation while entering a cave), Substrata is the layer just under Gaia’s “skin”. The second layer from the top of the deep time.
