Silje’s blog - Soil Building
Soil Building Matters


This page is a form of compost heap. I am at the moment in the process of breaking down and reconfiguring experiences from my work with soil and composting for the past couple of years. We are in the warm composting phase, where things change quite fast, right now. So no text is fixed. No layout is final. I hope you will enjoy the process with me. 

Making soil in your home, workplace or neighbourhood, is a very practical way of doing something to repair a tired planet, nurturing plants and millions of microbes you can’t even see, as well as nurturing yourself and the people around you. There are more organisms in a handful of soil than there are people on earth. You are working closely with these communities of microbes to create new soil. You will get to know them even if you can’t see them. They may warm you, break the organic matter down slowly or fast, depending on who is in charge. You will smell them, you may learn which enzymatic activity creates which smell, feel the changing textures, from liquid to dry, crumbly parts, depending on what is being broken down, how much oxygen there is, how humid it is. 

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Silje’s blog - Composting in Awkward Spaces
Image: Marine Gastineau for Metropolis CPH
Composting in Awkward Spaces: Workshops, Talks, Community


Since an artist residency with Metropolis in May 2024, I have been exploring how to communicate the warmth and importance of the soil building collectives to other humans, carrying out a number of exploratory composting and soil making workshops and talks, rooted in my urban composting practice. The practice is slowly developing itself all the time into different art-garden-community spaces, formats and collaborations, composting everything from grief to academic freedom and rest, grounded in affective soil, worm and microbe relationships. 

I love doing these workshops, so do not hesitate to ask me to come with my worms, soil or ferments to help you connect with the nurturing and healing collective processes of breakdown in soil making – materially, symbolically and politically. 

Links and images page from some of the events along the way: 
 
Workshop , Talks

Silje’s blog - Bokahsi Composting
How to Compost in your Kitchen


The easiest way to start developing an intimate reciprocal relationship with soil ecologies and soil beings - especially if you don’t have a garden you can experiment in, is to compost your left over food material and help microbes and other creatures in the work. The beginning of a simple step by step guide for which kitchen compsot method to choose, depending on your access to different types of materials and spaces, can be found below. 

The initial recipe was made for the research project ‘Design After Progress’, where I over the year of 2026 am participating in a fascinating community of Design Circles, exchanging and reflecting upon practices and methods with emergent designers of different ages, geographies and experiences. I received a lot of useful criticism from the seasoned designers, and see it as a task to improve upon these instructions shortly. The experience is in a way being able to go to design school for me for a year!! Stay tuned for better compost instructions page coming up. 

Compost Method Guide


Silje’s blog - Bokahsi Composting
Image: Event in Skovhavelunden curated by David Clark and Cansu Naz Tekir, photo by Andrew Prior
Regarding Urban Permaculture and Forest Gardening


Notes about a personal experience and outline for a potential research development project about permaculture, community, personal breakdown and finding meaning in ecological cycles that are so small that your own body can understand them. (Shout-out to Maja Elverkilde for the expression and a host of other people who could have been as well. It will be a long text.) 

I am putting a vignette up here already, to say that my permaculture volunteer work at Skovhavelunden, two intro-courses (with SkyeJin and Eva Max at Skovhavelunden, Mira Illeris and Esben Schultz at Skovvirke) and the intensive on site two-week Permaculture Design Course (PDC) at Skovvirke in 2024, were really fundamental to the way I am thinking and working now. In times of climate anxiety, rise of fascism and techno-capitalist hyperacceleration making so many of us exhausted in different ways, there is potential for resotring meaning and hope through new embodied experiences of different sense-making ecological environments/ communities/ vibrant matter like a forest garden. 

Text to come - please contact me if you want to work together, writing and developing some kind of open, inclusive, collaborative project around this. (This is of course not new, but I believe all of us each have a particular take on how to articulate the experience.)  

Silje’s blog - Tired Architecture
Tired Architecture: A Speculative Platform for Otherwise


“Tired Architecture// Uses of Utopia The work is an architectural exploration of home, housing and human settlements in times of exhaustion and burnout. We can no longer endure ‘cities on speed’, cities in constant ‘liveability’ competition or cities on laughing gas. The capitalist spectacle of the grand financialization of the housing market has gone haywire, and we are tired. Cities are tired. People are tired. The planet is tired. Architecture is tired.

We need hope. We need rest. We need care.”


Tired Architecture Conversations I and II were held in Det Lilla Rum, Copenhagen, June 2024 with suppoert form the Danish Arts Council and Dreyers Fond. 
One day there will be a publication from these wonderful gatherings, exploring the meaning of tired architecture across artistc disciplines and formats. 

Tired Architecture Circles gathered people in my home to share a space for tired people interested in exploring the tiredness as a collective and creative force. 


This was a form of transition project, between the work that had no space for me, across burnout and collapse, towards composting. I was exploring how artists and writers cound work with exhaustion and tiredness, what are the methods and formats for letting yourself be in your work, while yuo - for numerious potential reasons - are too exhausted to follow the capitalist production machine. 
Silje’s blog - Looking for Home
Looking for Home: A life of research  

This is the page for all the previous housing and urban research I have been doing over the years. The continuity in my work is the persistent search for meaning in the way we inhabit the world. I have studied housing cultures in Asia, Africa and northern Europe for my whole adult life, since my first Bachelor project based on a fieldwork grant to go (back) to Nepal in 2000. 

At the core of this work is a deep personal longing for home in a strange world. Starting out from a position of culture and social science, then becoming an architect and urbanist for a long time placed in a field of housing studies, the search has more recently led me out in the wider landscape, down into the ground and the conceptual and material way we world worlds. The way we build relations to the life around us and organise our entanglements of settlement and reproduction, is the way we inhabit the world and create meaning. Soil making is another chapter in the search for home, for strategies of inhabitation in an exhausted messy world.       

For selected project links, images and storytelling in progress page...

All  the other stuff  


Silje’s blog - Current Research
Current Academy Profile


Find some information about my current research and how I fit into the academic world of The Royal Danish Academy at the moment as a post doc: See research profile at the academy website. 

Compost weave in image by Chair for Biohybrid Architectures. 






Contact: silje.sollien@kglakademi.dk