At the edge of Queens where the city pauses, two landscapes of the same soil — a cemetery and a reservoir — 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.
Memory, time, and twin landscapes
Evergreen Cemetery and the Ridgewood Reservoir sit side by side. One bound to linear time the other in cyclical time. Together they form twin landscapes: one shaped by human rituals, the other by ecological succession.
We set out not only to study the history of these places, but to understand their personalities: how they might speak, what they might remember, and what they might say to each other. Through field trips, sound walks, writing exercises, and conversations with scientists, microbiologists, and mapmakers, we began to hear their distinct voices.
Soil Story was shot on 16mm film and digital camcorders. We shot, developed and then buried the film in the reservoir and cemetery for 12 days, resulting in distorted images from the microbes eating away at the film emulsion. The digital sequence was distorted using a circuit bent video processor. We recorded sounds using a geophone and some contact microphones to feel immersed in the soil.
The result is a conversation between two landscapes.
Created by
Olivia Acuña
Shakti Mb
Kiana Fernandez
Laura Alvear Roa
With support from UnionDocs
Filmed in Queens, New York
2025