What does the smell of the soil of a place tells us about itself?
Though the distinct smell of soil comes from geosmin, produced by a specific soil bacteria, recent metagenomic research suggests that the smell of soil mostly comes from reciprocal plant-fungal-bacterial interactions, specific to the certain biome of a place.
Smell as a sense does not take up as many words in English nearly as much as other senses. Most of the time when we are trying to describe smells, we use similes to compare it to an object or an environment, “smells grassy”, “smells like fish”, “smells like the soccer field.” There are only six words that describe smells uniquely. However, smell is one of the most prominent ways that unseen microorganisms communicate with humans. Volatile organic compounds such as terpenes produced by various biochemical pathways are specific to different tapestries of environmental biomes, and soils being one of them. Through bio-chemical diffusion, humans are able to communicate with soil microorganisms and store the information through our sensory system. This information often engages us with a specific geography and landscape.
Smell the Soil is a sensory data collection project that invited four cross-cultural participants, all residing in New York City at the time, to smell six different soil samples collected in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The participants processed the smell through their own geolocation based, sensory-memory repository. The collection of data resides in the poetics of smell and the possibility of connect- ing humans with soil microbes. In this project, humans act as data processors, and through language and memory, we measure and read the presence and communication signals of soil microbes and plant mycorrhiza. The processed data remains the poetics of smell, through which the participants linked the different locations of soil in New York City to places and pieces of memories all over the world.
