Tangles of time. Soil disturbances/perturbations as instruments of potential relationality for transition in the project

The original morphology of Rome has been profoundly altered by human interventions over the centuries, including earthworks, rubble piling, filling and channelling. These actions have hidden structures such as the ditches originally present on the surface. Backfill soils, consisting of man-made material stratified over time, form a new geological unit characterised by permeability. Water accumulates in these materials, flowing through preferential pathways and shaping the subterranean landscape as it transports matter. The dialogue between Gaia and Ctonia, the worlds that make up the earth, occurs through a fracture or threshold that allows the passage between above and below. The earth is understood as a place of coexistence between human and non-human entities, or earth-beings, with matter acting as a dynamic interface. The materialist approach recognises the geological layer as a source of energy and evolution, marking the end of one phase and the beginning of another. In this perspective, rupture is also constitutive, implying the embrace of impermanence, vulnerability, evanescence and disruption. The 'punctured space' becomes a condition of existence and modernity characterised by fluidity and fragility, similar to that of bodies inhabiting the surface of asphalt. To establish balance, the world can be seen as a metastable space in which energy accumulated and generated over time can unhinge and subvert the conventional stigma. By recognising the multiple interactions and relationships that unfold in this complex, moving world, and viewing the ground as a vibrant collection of bodies, disruption becomes the tangible starting point. This process is subject to a morphing-like transformation, with unpredictable and fluid changes. 'Solid' layers are tilted and bent by forces operating over immense intervals of time, indicating that the earth is in continuous formation. Thinking of things as objects excludes the formative process that shapes them, generating and modifying them over time (tempus, 'tempestas', violent atmospheric disturbance). Time, 'weather', is understood as agent, a fluid medium, a sphere of forces and relationships that constitute the meteorological world. Phase transitions' show how fluidity can be a constitutive property of matter. Arnold Berleant, describes the earth as subject to continuous change because it is non-stationary, both rapid, sudden and slow and settling. Coexistance between humans and 'earth-beings' is proposed as a necessary scenario, in which metamorphosis allows for the overcoming of binary relations between different scenarios and projects and the imposition of radical, solutionist positions. The suspension of the project that familiarisation with fluidity entails the willingness to engage in and correspond with ongoing processes. If the project continues to be rigid, immobile to the fluidity of matter, suspension is instead proposed as a listening, it is to suspend in order to feel, to perceive a state of consciousness induced in us by the external world through the senses or any affective state arising in the soul. The rupture is the fissure in which it materialises, and in a tangible way manifests itself. The surface that we inhabit and that one would like to be hard does not resist the elemental forces of heaven and earth that erode it from above and subvert it from below: it cracks and crumbles, and when it does, the earth returns to the light and opens up to life.