At the edge of queens, where the city pauses, two landscapes — a cemetery and a reservoir — of the same soil watch each other transform.

A retreating glacier drops a mix of stones, sand, and clay along a ridge. The thin, quick-draining topsoil it leaves behind is too poor as it is thin and drains fast. Its elevation and poor farm value made it practical real estate for two very different projects: the cemetery belt and the ridgewood reservoir.

After Manhattan banned most burials in 1847, churches buy this unwanted land in Queens tax-free due to the Rural Cemetery Act. Graveyards soon line the slope, and coffins, lime, and imported topsoil begin reshaping the ground.

The Evergreens Cemetery honors about 1,200 sailors with a group burial, creating the cemetery belt's first large-scale human layer.

Engineers cut two deep basins, strip away the topsoil, and seal the floor with earthen concrete. When water arrives in 1859, Brooklyn celebrates while the buried soil lies locked beneath the new infrastructure.

Waste from the nearby Wolff-Alport Chemical Company drifts over Evergreens Cemetery, leaving a thin but lasting layer of radioactive thorium in the top few inches of soil.

The state seizes cemetery land, exhumes graves, flattens hills, and fills ponds to lay six lanes of asphalt. Roadbed gravel and compacted fill seal parts of the ridge.

The east basin is emptied and the site placed on standby. Wind-blown silt and leaf litter start rebuilding soil on the dry concrete floor, launching a slow forest succession.

New York State designates the reservoir's center basin a freshwater wetland, giving legal cover to the self-made forest and the soil that has formed there over six decades.

Soil Story is a 16mm film, combining found foliage and an experimental approach to the film developing process that is in collaboration with the environment. The film explores the juxtaposing histories and memories of the ridgewood reservoir and the cemetery belt. Two locations that straddle each other with the Jackie Robinson parkway cut in between. With both locations in conversation with each other, we will explore the cycles of time, space, memory and land development and disposal.

Created by Olivia Acuña, Shakti Mb, Kiana Fernandez and Laura Alvear Roa.

This project is a UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Production.