In her new project Terra Xenobiotica, artist Saša Spačal explores the life of soil in the surrounding area of the airports. The installation consists of two parts. The film Holding Patterns, written in collaboration with theorist Alison Sperling, describes a dystopian scenario in which the soils of abandoned airports, no longer active in their function, are discovered and analysed. Usually so familiar and crowded to us, instead these places appear deserted, huge, contaminated, dangerous. With a solemn and tragic timbre the velvety voice-over follows panoramic and detailed visions of polygons of land, protagonists of an incomprehensible poisoning. The installation Eternity Scanner, on the other hand, invites the audience to explore this contamination. Like an oracle, the device sonifies the data of a chromatogram (a graph produced by a chromatographic analysis of chemicals), the peaks of which describe the amounts of pollutants present in soil samples, in particular perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) such as Teflon, a so-called forever chemical. “Soil is a medium where something takes hold” is one of the phrases that appear in the film’s frames: the earth welcomes, but also holds the evil that has incomprehensibly been done to it. The expressions that define our identity often use the metaphor of roots and earth but here take on a more material, pregnant and atavistic meaning, taking a very distant meaning from the elusive continuous loop of take-offs and landings.