For the German designer Johanna Seelemann (Leipzig, 1990) the earth is not merely a material used to build new objects but something fragile and precious, to be taken care of. Her most recent project, Soil Assembly (playing on both meanings of the word “assembly”), started from research into Iceland, a very special country as it has almost no trees; the beech forests that once covered much of the island were almost all chopped down by the Vikings in the 9th century. Today, the attempts at reforestation clash with the poor soil, which no longer has the micronutrients needed for the plants to grow. The designer imagined a series of objects able to slowly and gradually “cure” the Icelandic soil, releasing nutrients that decompose or are eroded by the acid rain. For the project, Seelemann was forced to work according to an abnormally long time frame: “The first step was to understand that human beings and the earth live on different time lines, one biological and the other geological. When the soil is new, it is hundreds of years old. What may seem static to us is in fact something that transforms continuously, in a microcosm swarming with life,” she explains.
The attention to the needs of even the most microscopical living beings is a constant feature of Johanna Seelemann’s work, and last year in Milan she presented Micrographia – Redesign for Biodiversity, a series of proposals for creating niches in our cities in which plants, insects, birds and small animals can live in harmony with human beings. Her idea of a new, more welcoming Milan – for all its inhabitants and not only Homo Sapiens – came to the fore in three quite unique objects. The first, seed bombs in raw earth, sand, straw and clay have a rounded shape inspired by one of the city’s most iconic street furnishings, the concrete Panettone designed by Enzo Mari in 1980, and were created to grow different local Lombardy plant species, thus helping bees and other pollinating insects to survive. The second, a geopolymer façade made from rice waste and recycled glass is designed to welcome swallows and other birds, while the third, terracotta vases, exploit an irrigation technique used in Ancient Greece to supply water to the roots of different types of plants.
“‘Micrographia’ is the title of one of the first scientific best sellers, published in 1665. Having recently perfected his new invention – the microscope –, the British author Robert Hooke described some of his most thrilling observations, from a bee’s stinger to the crystalline structure of snowflakes,” Johanna Seelemann continues. “For me, the microscope lens is a useful metaphor of how we can change our view of reality: things appear very different to how we see them with the naked eye, while in fact they are still the same.” Zooming in on the image, we can see more and more tiny details, making us understand how urban environments are teeming with non-human life forms. “When we talk of inclusive design, we usually do so in anthropocentric terms, thinking of how to guarantee accessibility for people with different backgrounds and abilities. A revised definition could on the other hand evoke the design of products and environments that are useful for many living species at the same time,” the designer continues.
Earth is one of Johanna Seelemann’s favourite materials, and she particularly admires its ability to continuously renew and take on different forms. In recent years, she has explored the aesthetic potential of Marsclay, a special clay used in the car industry to produce life-sized prototypes (in Terra Incognita, the project presented for her dissertation at the Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2019) and raw clay mixed with straw (in Hortolanus, developed between 2021 and 2022). “Raw – not fired – clay works can be destroyed, mixing earth with water, and recreated an infinite number of times. I was able to learn this technique, which has demonstrated its intelligence over the centuries, in Wangelin, in northern Germany.”
