My practice had been based within people and communities and suddenly I realised I had a new community to work with, my family and neighbours .

I wrote them a letter explaining my project and asking for contributions on the topic of Soil-Care and Self-Care, in particularly in relation to the quarantine we were all in.

I was very surprised by the amount of answers I received. All came from very personal feelings, emotions, and experiences.  
I realised that my project had taken, with the development of the Covid situation, a whole other meaning triggered by the thoughts that arose from the reality of the situation.

Here are some answers I received :

‘’The garden provides so much happiness […]. It shows us that happiness is not so far or so complicated!’’
‘’This time of confinement is the ideal moment to rethink the way in which we exploit, sometimes improperly, the resources that our planet offers us.’’

‘’I remember my high school teacher told us that it took 1 year to create 1 millimetre of soil, and that it took a thousand years to create a meter of soil ... and that all of this could be so quickly destroyed ...’’

‘’I contemplate the garden for long minutes.’’

‘’It is important to rediscover our environment and what it can provide us with food, medicines and raw materials.’’

Joining Bellacasa’s* thought about the need for humans to be part of an ecological foodweb, I think it is important to envisage going back to a more autonomous societal situation. Linking to my project, to improve our human-soil relation isn’t just a personal, but a global need. We must reconnect with nature to explore what it can give us in terms of food, medicine, and material.

*Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2015). Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care. Social Studies of Science, 45(5), 691-71