The Weight of the Soil: a bomb cloud sculpted from earth, straw and water in an abandoned Lisbon school

# What the work is Soil is a large-scale, in situ sculptural installation by Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artists Saman & Sasan Oskouei (Oskouei Studio). Built inside an abandoned school in Lisbon, the piece renders a bomb cloud using earth-based materials: soil, sand, straw, water, and a simple wooden frame.

# How it's made A minimal wood structure defines the overall form. Layers of adobe are applied by hand to that frame, producing irregular, cloud-like masses. The artists deliberately leave the surface texture and character of the soil visible rather than smoothing it away. As the earth dries and hardens, the ephemeral image of an airborne explosion becomes a static, ground-bound object that reads like a landscape.

• Soil
• Artists: Oskouei Studio — Saman & Sasan Oskouei
• Location: abandoned school, Lisbon, Portugal
• Materials: adobe (soil, sand, straw, water), wood
• Dimensions: 300 × 250 × 280 cm

# Where it sits and why that matters The installation occupies a school building that had been unused for approximately 15 years. The building's worn architecture—tiled walls, damaged ceiling, and traces of former use—remains part of the composition. Placing a form associated with destruction inside a space associated with learning and future-making creates a direct spatial and symbolic tension. The bomb cloud is not presented as an event but as an aftermath that becomes embedded in architecture and landscape.

# What the work does conceptually Instead of depicting the moment of explosion, the artists focus on what follows: dust settling, material hardening, and transformation of violence into terrain. Using earth—a material most often linked to shelter, home, and permanence—to render an image of destruction reframes both the material and the subject. The sculpture ties a fleeting, screen-mediated image to the physical ground, asking viewers to consider how violence persists in memory and built environments.

# Visual and tactile qualities The surface keeps fingerprints of the making process: layered adobe, straw fibers, and visible soil texture. That material honesty gives the cloud a grainy, tactile presence. As the adobe cures, the mass reads less like a transient plume and more like a topography—an object that could be walked around and inspected like any piece of landscape.

# Where this project was presented Designboom published the installation as a project submission through its readers' DIY feature. The article frames the piece within broader conversations about earth architecture, interactive and sculptural installation, and site-responsive work.

# Concrete takeaways for readers

• The choice of an abandoned school intensifies the work's questions about memory, future, and the aftereffects of violence on places of learning.
• As the adobe hardens, the bomb cloud literally becomes a landscape, making the aftermath of destruction a stable presence in the built environment.

# Why it matters to viewers Soil invites slow looking and physical engagement. It resists the quick circulation of images by turning a split-second visual into a sizeable, tactile volume that occupies and alters existing architecture.