topsoil is a transnational curatorial and research collective formed by Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel in 2017 in London. Individually engaged in research areas such as material feminism, critical ecologies, postcoloniality, and geopolitics and based in different geographical contexts – San Jose (Costa Rica), Istanbul (Turkey) and Berlin (Germany), together we seek to bring into conversation this multitude of contextual and disciplinary perspectives. Through creating a process of prolonged conversation, we ask how to work and think with each other through an approach that prioritizes care and sensibility to what drives our research and practice.
We therefore initiate long-term collaborative research projects with thinkers and practitioners from various places and disciplines to collect methods and tools that help us move towards a shared ground while being attentive to specificities. We develop experimental exhibition formats as collective efforts and rehearsal spaces. In addition, we invite the participants to continue thinking together across distance through our online archive. Here, we share the reflections that surface in the afterlife of an encounter, we re-think and re-work, we rehearse and fail, and become attentive to the ways in which ideas are moved, inflected and twisted differently over time and space.