Between Soils

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A Ritual for Re-wilding the Future

In Nebraska, a small network of seed keepers, growers, botanists, artists, researchers, and ecological communities begins asking a question:

What does it mean to preserve something living?

Across generations, seeds have moved through the Great Plains and Midwest alongside people, agriculture, trade, migration, settlement, displacement, changing climates, and changing landscapes. Some remain in the ground. Others have entered botanical collections, research institutions, universities, seed banks, private collections, and archives.

Many have traveled far from the landscapes and communities with which their histories are intertwined.

From Nebraska, The Society for Future Seed Relations forms around a shared proposition:

A seed should not spend eternity in storage.

The Society issues its first call.

LET THE SEEDS MOVE AGAIN.

To seed banks, universities, botanical collections, research institutions, agricultural archives, growers, and private collections:

Open the archives.

Trace the journeys.

Find the people and places connected to what you hold.

Share what you know.

Return decision-making to those relationships.

And where life remains possible, let the seed enter the world again.

The call does not demand that every seed return to a fixed point of origin. Nor does it propose another institution with authority over where seeds belong.

Instead, it asks institutions to relinquish something more fundamental:

the assumption that preservation requires permanent possession.

The Society begins connecting collections with growers, researchers, communities, and landscapes. Records once held separately begin to meet one another. Stories surface. Routes are traced.

Seeds begin traveling again.

Not simply backward, but toward their next possible life.

Whenever possible, a seed moves toward landscapes and communities with which it holds historical, cultural, or ecological relationships. But an exact return is not always possible.

Landscapes have changed.

Climate has shifted.

Habitats have disappeared.

Communities have moved.

Some seeds have lost their ability to germinate entirely.

The objective is therefore not restoration to an imagined past.

The seed is not asked to return to what was.

It is asked what life might come next.

The first journeys converge in Nebraska.

Here, within the landscapes of the Great Plains, a small collection of buildings becomes a station between where a seed has been and where it might travel next.

It is called Between Soils.

The Recording House

Every traveling seed first enters the Recording House.

At its center is an open courtyard containing the Smoke Tower.

The ritual is intentionally intimate. One or two people enter with the seed, occasionally three. They gather close to the ground around a low rectanuglar table beneath a suspended microphone.

A traveler. A witness. A seed.

Each arrival is given time to be heard.

The Recording House

The seed is placed beneath a scanner embedded within the table. The system identifies the seed and determines whether it remains capable of germination.

Then its story is spoken aloud.

Its species.

Where it first grew.

The landscapes through which it has traveled.

Who carried it.

Who cared for it.

Where it has been stored.

How long it has waited.

The recording becomes part of a growing archive of traveling seeds and the relationships that have accompanied their movement.

As the voice is recorded, a screen within the table translates it into Morse code.

With the press of a single button, the message travels from the table to the Smoke Tower standing in the courtyard.

The voice becomes code.

The code becomes smoke.

Short and long signals rise above the building and across the Nebraska landscape.

The intimate act becomes visible at a distance.

The smoke does not announce that the seed has gone backward.

It announces the seeds arrival.

The Planting Shed & The Seed Sanctuary

After recording, the seed's path divides. The question is no longer simply: Where did this seed come from? It becomes: What future is still possible for it?

If it can Grow

A viable seed travels to the Planting Shed.

Here, the traveler gathers what is needed for the next stage of its journey: tools, soil amendments, vessels, maps, instructions, and knowledge about the conditions the species requires.

Some seeds remain in Nebraska.

Others continue outward.

They move through gardens, farms, prairies, and communities across the Great Plains and Midwest. Some journeys eventually extend farther, following relationships that cross regions, borders, and continents.

The Society does not assume that geographic origin alone determines where a seed belongs.

Its future is considered through ecological research and, more importantly, through the knowledge of people who hold relationships with that plant and place.

Then the seed leaves the architecture. It enters the landscape. The act is deliberately uncertain. Planting does not guarantee survival. It gives life another possibility.

A seed that can no longer germinate is not automatically kept.

Whenever its relationships can be traced, the seed continues its journey toward the communities and landscapes to which its history belongs.

It may no longer carry the possibility of germination, but it still carries memory.

It may be returned to the people who once grew it, the community that carried it, or the place where its story can continue to be held and remembered.

Not every return requires growth.

But some seeds no longer have a clear place to return to.

Their landscapes may have disappeared. Their communities may have moved or become impossible to trace. Their records may be incomplete. Some have traveled for so long that the relationships surrounding them have been lost.

These seeds travel instead to the Seed Sanctuary.

Inside, shelves hold ceramic vessels containing seeds whose biological lives have ended and whose journeys have, for the moment, nowhere else to go.

Each remains connected to the record created in the Recording House: where it grew, where it traveled, who carried it, who cared for it, and what is still unknown.

The sanctuary becomes neither cemetery nor conventional seed bank.

It is an archive of interrupted possibilities.

Ceramic creatures, masks, textiles, drawings, vessels, and small sculptural guardians inhabit the sanctuary alongside the seeds. These objects belong to the evolving culture of Between Soils, a material world accumulating around the practice of caring for what can no longer grow itself.

But entering the sanctuary does not mean a seed's journey is permanently over.

Records remain open. Relationships may be rediscovered. A name, a story, a community, or a landscape may emerge years later.

And when a connection is found, the seed may travel again.

Until then, the sanctuary holds what has not yet found its way home.

Travelers House

Seeds are not the only things traveling through Between Soils.

Researchers, growers, seed keepers, artists, families, and other travelers arrive carrying knowledge, questions, memories, and sometimes seeds of their own.

Some journeys cannot be completed in a day. Beside the other structures sits a small Traveler's House.

Those accompanying a seed can stay overnight while waiting to plant, document, study, or determine where the journey should continue.

They eat.

They sleep.

They exchange stories.

They study maps.

They learn what has arrived before them.

And in the morning, they continue into the landscape.

The architecture recognizes something simple:

Sometimes care requires time.

A Growing Network

The Movement Grows.

Between Soils begins in Nebraska.

But it is not intended to remain there.

The Society makes its methods available to others: how to receive a seed, trace its journey, gather witnesses, record its story, investigate its relationships, determine whether it can still grow, and collectively ask what should happen next.

There is no universal building to reproduce.

There is no headquarters to answer to.

A community does not need permission to begin.

It gathers the people, knowledge, materials, and relationships necessary to care for what arrives and builds according to the conditions of its own place.

Across the Midwest, new stations begin appearing.

Some occupy existing buildings.

Some are gardens.

Some consist only of a table, an archive, and a place to plant.

Others grow into Recording Houses, Planting Sheds, Seed Sanctuaries, Traveler's Houses, and fields.

No two stations are identical.

Their architecture responds to climate, available materials, ecology, culture, and local knowledge.

Their rituals change as the people practicing them change.

Their relationships determine their form.

What travels is not the building.

What travels is the practice.

A seed leaving Nebraska reaches another community.

A grower exchanges knowledge with another grower.

A researcher connects an institution holding seeds with people who have relationships to them.

A traveler carries a story from one landscape into another.

A new station forms.

Another journey begins.

Gradually, these relationships move across the Midwest and beyond it.

The movement grows not through replication or expansion, but through connection.

What remains shared is a simple practice:

Arrive

Gather

Listen

Record

Ask What Life is Possible

Grow, enter the landscape

or

Keep, enter the sanctuary

A Constellation, Not an Institution

The Society for Future Seed Relations does not own the seeds.

It does not own the stations.

It does not determine where every seed belongs.

It cannot reproduce a landscape that has disappeared, undo a history of displacement, or return the world to an earlier condition.

Its work is to create relationships through which another future can be negotiated.

Decisions remain with the people, communities, growers, and knowledge holders who have relationships to the plants and landscapes involved.

What begins in Nebraska moves through the Midwest and outward, not as an expanding institution, but as a constellation of autonomous places connected through shared practices of listening, recording, growing, keeping, and care.

Many places.

Many forms.

No center.

And although the network may eventually stretch across great distances, its fundamental act remains deliberately small:

One seed, One traveler, One witness.

A voice spoken quietly around a table becomes a signal visible across the prairie.

A voice spoken quietly around a table becomes a signal visible across the prairie.

A seed once preserved by being removed from the world is given another possibility:

to enter the soil again.

to become entangled with weather, insects, animals, people, and other plants.

to take part in the slow rewilding of the world.

Program
Seed Migration + Ecological Research Landscape

Research Focus
Research into architecture as infrastructure for seed migration, ecological memory, future growth, and collective stewardship through recording, ritual, planting, preservation, and exchange.

Between Soils is a speculative architectural project exploring migration through the movement of seeds.

Beginning in Nebraska, the project considers seeds as travelers, living carriers of ecological memory, cultural knowledge, and relationships to place. It imagines a future in which seeds held within botanical collections, seed banks, universities, and other institutions begin moving again.

Rather than assuming that preservation requires permanent possession, Between Soils asks who should participate in determining a seed’s future. Seeds may travel toward communities and landscapes connected to their histories, enter new soils where future life is possible, or be held in collective stewardship when their relationships can no longer be traced.

Through architecture, ritual, recording, planting, and collective participation, the project examines migration not as a simple movement away from and back toward an origin, but as an ongoing negotiation between memory, belonging, displacement, ecology, and change.

Ultimately, Between Soils asks how architecture might move away from systems of possession and control toward infrastructures of relationship, stewardship, and care and how the movement of something as small as a seed might participate in the slow rewilding of the world.

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