From the archive
23 Aug 2026
The first Soil Assembly happened in 2022 at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore. Its premise was that soil is not just a growing medium but a meeting point - for food and water cycles, for biodiversity, for the histories of the people who live on it - and that you learn it by working it, not by reading about it. Rather than another international conference, the organisers built a network of distributed gatherings tied together by an online community.
The third assembly took place at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The guest lists are unusual: farmers and growers alongside artists and designers, scientists alongside seed keepers, gardeners, hackers and landscape practitioners - people who would not normally share a room inside a university or a cultural institution. What they do together is practical. Composting, fermenting food, collecting seed, mapping ecosystems, running basic soil tests and low-tech citizen-science experiments, and listening to people who carry generations of knowledge about a particular piece of ground.
The network calls its method 'living pedagogies', by which it means two things. First, that no hierarchy is imposed between expert and non-expert knowledge - scientific research, farming tradition, artistic experiment and local memory are put in situations where they can change each other. Second, that ecological literacy should not be a specialist subject bolted onto an art or design curriculum, but part of creative practice itself, taught through field laboratories, learning farms, residencies and workshops in actual territories.
Some of the vocabulary is homemade: 'permacircularities', 'social fermentation', borrowed from permaculture, circular economies and slow food to describe processes that refuse to resolve into a single project or a quick fix. The stated ambition is not a new institution or a model to be replicated, but a loose network of situated experiments, each one shaped by its own ground.
Map one small piece of ground as the assemblies do: a garden, an allotment strip, a verge. Walk it weekly through a season, noting what grows, where water sits after rain, where the soil is bare - a notebook and pencil, nothing else. Pair it with a compost heap built from your own kitchen and garden waste, and by year's end you have both a record of the place and a way of feeding it.
Makery · Read the source