Debra Solomon is an Amsterdam-based artist and founder of Urbaniahoeve Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture. Urbaniahoeve (which translates as ‘The city as our farm’) has developed food-system infrastructures at several public space locations in the Hague and Amsterdam, transforming the existing landscape architecture, while prioritising eco-system health, and implementing in situ topsoil production. Debra Solomon’s early public space-related work included CULIBLOG.ORG, a weblog about food, food culture, and the culture that grows our food, a pop-up concept restaurant exclusively serving micro-greens and the Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking project in collaboration with the Freehouse Collective; a free kitchen that ‘super-used’ surplus from the Netherlands’ biggest outdoor market.
As an expert in food-system infrastructure Solomon co-curated in 2007 the Edible City (Dutch Architecture Institute), the Netherlands’ first exhibition on food and the built environment, and was food domain expert of the Designs of the Times (DOTT 07) Urban Farming Project, in Newcastle (UK). In 2008 as designer invitee to the international design biennial at Saint-Etienne’s (FR), Solomon exhibited community tools for food and sustainability (Communauté Choucroute) at City Eco Lab. Solomon was recently artist-in-residence in a programme initiated by the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Natural World at Dartington Estate’s Schumacher College, which has since acquired her work.

Current activities: As artist in residence for the UK’s Centre for Contemporary Art in the Natural World (CCANW), Solomon produced a series of silk screen prints (titled “En Necromass”) about her own research and experience with soil production at the Urbaniahoeve locations. The CCANW’s Soil Culture exhibition, with seven other artists, is touring the participating British institutions through June 2016.
In December 2015 Solomon with artist Jaromil Rojo exhibited the collaborative art installation Entropical, as part of the Zone2Source exhibition series in the Glass House pavilion in the Amsterdam Amstel Park. The artistic research and exhibition contrasts the use and exchange values of the living soil to those of our current financial system. One of the works (“REALBOTANIK”) uses urban waste and waste heat from computational activity to produce mycelial mats that Solomon uses for topsoil production. Solomon and Rojo’s installation produces both undervalued topsoil and ecosystem fertility, protein, and over valued BitCoin. See http://www.entropical.org/

For two months starting in June 2016 Solomon is artist-in-residence at Amsterdam’s Waag Society for Old and New Media, and the Amsterdam Graphic Atelier funded by a grant from the Mondriaan Foundation. Using chromatography on self-produced topsoils Solomon will produce an edition of works on paper that reflect on a non-anthrocentric perspective of the natural world.
As of Spring 2016 Debra Solomon is a PhD candidate at the TU Delft, Department of Multi-actor Systems.
Solomon is represented by STAFFROOM Gallery