When we were invited to participate in the 2024 Flowers and Gardens Festival to exhibit a garden, we began by doubting. How to present a garden that speaks of the alive and of time, but that is temporary?

We wanted to speak of something common to all landscapes, yet invisible. To show the hidden layer of gardens, forests, fields, and deserts. Where roots, together with microorganisms, create life, already in the first centimetres of soil. We sought to depict, with the body of a dead palm, the transformation of soil. A return to humus. A fleeting, transparent moment that reveals its creation and evolution. Let its creation be the space. Let the space be collective. In human time. In time with the body. Let us get dirty, for earth is not dirt. Let us cut, move, and arrange the dead branches, dry leaves, and decaying trunks. For death will become life. Let it demonstrate the collective energy we possess to protect soils, even to create them. Let a movement unfold, a collaborative process. For nature collaborates, it does not compete.

The Canary Island Date Palms Phoenix canariensis in Mexico City are dying due to a pest, with trunks stripped of leaves and fallen branches decaying on the streets. Protection laws make removal nearly impossible.

‘Humus’, the original component of soil, has the same root as ‘human’. Humans are the earthly ones; they originate from soil. Departing from non-anthropocentric thinking and taking humus as a lens for being-in-the-world, possibilities emerge of recognizing new sets of relations and new ways of make life habitable, even as un-liveability spreads. Humus can inspire the cultivation of collective and collaborative responses against fierce competition and regressive individualism. With humus, humans can elaborate strategies to rebuild ‘a world that contains other worlds’, rather than excluding those worlds and ideas that do not align with dominant views. As Donna Haraway wrote: ‘We are compost, not posthuman.’

Romakin and Saracino, ‘Humus’