Oneiric Soils

At the “Oneiric Soils” residency project hosted by the Wild Alchemy Lab in Kos, Greece in the Autumn of 2023, a collective pre-slumber tomato eating exercise was composed as an invitation to dream with the ntomáta (ντομάτα, tomato). Through a collaboration with Louise Carver, and discussions with other participants, an exercise emerged that aligned with the overall intention for dream collectively with plants. Participants include Cassie Thornton, Kalpana Arias, Adam Carr, Sophia Rokhlin, Jamie Perera, Joel 'Ventral Is Golden' Galvin, and Jemma Foster, along with numerous online participants and tomatoes. Situated by the Oneiric Soil project's intentions to cultivate ecological vision, the group evolved dynamics and intimacy in their sharing of activities normally relegated to the private, domestic sphere: sleeping and eating.

As an exercise in working with the psychotropic effects of 'everyday' foods, raw tomato flesh was an initiator/inhibitor for exploring collective eating, sleeping and the aesthetic, referential and psycho-active properties of foods on our subconscious reveries. Readings and incantations in Kos, such as the poems “Tomato” by Katha Pollitt (1979) and “In my next life let me be a tomato” by Natasha Rao (2021), accompany the nightshade bedtime snack: Acknowledging that it is, in fact, the slight toxicity and acidity of nightshades that activates our memories of dreaming, as it prevents deep sleep states. Other actions and discussions revolved around the contemporary, overlapping and interrelated difficulties and obsessions people have with ‘gut health’ and ‘sleep hygiene’, the mass media mass effects of digital blue-screen time, cybernetic health efficiency apps, and distressing or calming media content on neural and guttural ‘wellness’.

Oneiric Soils, devised by Jemma Foster is a space where artists, researchers, activists, and visionaries come together to dream with plants. The project intends to diffuse the myth of separation and reestablish symbiotic, co-creative partnership by exploring the liminal realms with more-than-human intelligence. As a group, speculative ecologies, ecosystem resilience, and interspecies communication are explored.