Poetics of Soil
by Marshmallow Laser Feast
Music & Spatial Sound Design: James Bulley
2025
8-minute video with 12.1 multichannel sound
23 January–13 April 2025, Soil: The World at our Feet, Somerset House, UK.
Poetics of Soil: Fly Agaric I is a film-sound installation artwork that explores the hidden kingdoms of life underground. It features the words and voice of mycologist and author Merlin Sheldrake. Within the piece, the Amanita Muscaria mushroom pulses and oscillates, unveiling the hidden rhythms of the earth’s soil—a glimpse into the “home of the lives that give us life.”
For at least half a billion years, fungi have played the role of nature’s recycler, breaking down dead plant and animal matter into smaller molecules that are returned to the soil. Circular by nature, this process enriches the soil and makes nutrients available for plants and forest life to reuse. This symbiosis between plants and fungi weaves the Earth’s soils into living networks, comparable in complexity to neural pathways.
The relationship between plants and fungi gave rise to the biosphere as we know it. Fungi has long occupied the indigenous imagination, where it entwines with mysticism in science and the interconnectedness of more-than-human species. The Poetics of Soil series seeks to create a window into this unseen world – connecting us anew with these ancient, elemental systems some of us have long been disconnected from.
Marshmallow Laser Feast, 2025
“The most spectacular work in the show concerns this secret labour. The artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast take us on a psychedelic film journey underground to reveal the astonishing role of fungi roots in breaking down and recycling dead plant and animal matter to enrich the soil. This flowing network twinkles like a highway by night, glowing with miraculous colours and sending up the life force into a mushroom above, which in turns sheds its spores out across the air – altering the world’s weather. Merlin Sheldrake’s commentary – about the wild intimacies of our coexistence with soil, how being is always being with, and so on – is pure poetry. And the film continues without cease in the most perfect ecological loop.”
Credits
An Artwork by Marshmallow Laser Feast : Ersin Han Ersin, Barnaby Steel, Robin McNicholas
Words and Voice: Merlin Sheldrake
Executive Producers: Carolina Vallejo, Eleanor (Nell) Whitley, Mike Jones
Sound Design and Spatialisation: James Bulley
Lead Producer: Emma Hamilton
Lead Artist: Quentin Corker-Marin
Houdini Technical VFX Artist: Nicolas Le Dren
Infrastructure Lead: Andrew Robinson
Head of Studio: Sarah Gamper Marconi
Studio Administrator & Production Assistant: Alexandra McRobbie
Scientific Advisors & Contributors
Francis Martin
Jamie Lochhead
Merlin Sheldrake