Lal Mati is an elegy for a landscape on the brink of irreversible change. Recently sanctioned as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the essence of Shantiniketan is eroding under the pressure of tourism and commercial development. Its pastoral beauty– immortalized in the poems of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore–is disappearing beneath poorly constructed concrete roads, cement boundary walls, luxury resorts, and sprawling vacation communities. The region’s iconic red dirt roads (lal mati) symbolize this disruption and emphasize a pressing need for balance between preservation and progress.

In 2020, I collected a soil sample from the road behind my house when I saw that it, too, would soon be smudged from the landscape. I memorialized this through the agricultural process of soil chromatography; creating visual fingerprints of the land’s mineral composition (find scientific details further below). As winding backroads lined with farmland surrender to urbanization, these photographic impressions offer traces of a fading memory, forming an expanding archive as I continue to document this fragile terrain.

A saffron stone slips from my necklace; swallowed by the parched land below.
Searching. Sifting. Rivers of sand through my fingers.
Why do we ferry treasured things by a thread?

Protect all that is fragile and cherished and (nearly) lost in our abandon.

One of the most common questions I receive about soil chromatograms is, “How do you interpret them?”

The most important thing to understand is that chromatograms give a *broad* understanding of the soil’s fertility. Soil chromatography doesn’t have strong quantitative measures, such as describing the exact percentage of iron present in the soil. Rather, the visuals are interpreted by looking at zones/spikes/channels.

A soil solution is wicked up through the center of lab-quality filter paper and radiates outwards. The heaviest components (minerals) stay in what is called the ‘inner zone’. The mid-zone would hold lighter components such as organic compounds, and the very lightest reach to the outer zones (enzymes, etc.).

Spikes and channels give an impression of soil diversity and nutrition. (You won’t see much of that in these particular samples of roadway topsoil.)

Some pieces in the series look like apparitions where edges of the ring soften and fold in on themselves or have some other sort of visual anomaly. The simplest explanation is user error. Compelling visual effects appear by dipping the filter paper directly into the solution tray or spilling/spreading the liquid rather than absorbing it all through the center wick.

Care should be taken with with the types of dishes used to hold the liquid emulsion because the presence of something like rust in a metal mason jar lid would contaminate the sample.

Botanist Mikhail Tsvet first outlined soil chromatography in the early 1900s.

‘Lal Mati’ is in conversation with a much larger and ongoing collection of words, photographs & field recordings that document the vanishing landscape; including research on population studies, environmental concerns, cultural dynamics, and more. Click here to learn more about this work in the The Limitless Alternative interview filmed for exhibition at MS University Baroda.