Soil is a dense, living community of bacteria, fungi, worms, insects, and roots. Each organism absorbing, processing, exchanging, and passing the world along. When PFAS enter this community, they are taken in all the same. And so the substances accumulate across the entire soil community and eventually seeping into the groundwater. In the discussion around PFAS, the human body is centralised, and accountability is quickly deferred by placing blame on soil community members: the worm that transfers toxins to the chicken’s eggs, or vegetables that should not be eaten. That PFAS producers like Chemours are responsible and knowingly poison the living environment is diffused by the feral character of the chemicals. In the case of PFAS, there is no sense of multispecies justice. What accumulation does to the living soil, to the entangled relationships they enable, remains largely unknown.

An oracle is a medium that channels a knowledge greater than the one who is consulted, a force or intelligence that exceeds human frameworks and must be slowly, carefully read. The consultation of this oracle is made urgent by the level of PFAS contamination the soil carries, how this affects their community, and with it, everyone who depends on them. The oracle may respond by holding a key to remediation, a beginning to undo what industry has made omnipresent. However, there is an equal chance the oracle might answer in a lack of diversity and vibrancy, making tangible what the forever chemicals may cost the worm, the microbe, the unseen collaborators of the underground. Forever Oracle holds all these possibilities, mapped out over distance, materiality and time.

At Kunstkerk Dordrecht, the oracle has been developing for three months. During this time, the columns have shown different stages. First, the sediment calmed, sank, and formed bands. Gas formed from the rich nutrient environment and the warmth; the installation sat under a partially glass roof during a heatwave. Even though the columns were covered and further sealed by the weight of sheets of glass and the columns atop them, they were leaky. PFAS is a trickster, invisibly always on the move. Their drips left markings: oily, glowy snakes on the glass surface. Over time, soil bacteria started to respond. Though some columns developed some green spots of photosynthesising organisms, most show reddish-purple colonies. None of the usual Wynogradski patterns of layering are visible as of yet.

Now that the exhibition has closed, the columns have been placed in my studio, where they will continue to develop for the foreseeable future. Wynogradski columns can live up to a decade.