Pedro Soler: “During the Soil Assembly, we explored how the natural world has an agency of itself.”
Interview with Pedro Soler – writer, punk gardener and main curator of Soil Assembly #2 Tinku Uku Pacha, the second edition of an interdisciplinary gathering dedicated to soil and bioeconomies. Hosted in La Chimba, a rural indigenous community in the Andean highlands of Ecuador, the Assembly took place from May 8–10, 2025, with the aim of sharing local and international perspectives as well as amplifying indigenous leadership in homage to peasant leader Tránsito Amaguaña.
At Soil Assembly #2 Tinku Uku Pacha, over three days, participants explored regenerative rural economies (Day 1), the intersections of soil science, art, and planetary peasantry (Day 2), and celebrated Tránsito Amaguaña, the earth and indigenous culture (Day 3). The event brought together farmers, artists, scientists, activists, and local residents to co-create practices and dialogues for soil health, food sovereignty, and cultural resilience. Streaming options and simultaneous translation were provided to connect global audiences with on-site dialogues. The event was produced by La Divina Papaya and Upayaku Foundation.
Could you tell us about the area where you live and what is special about it?
Pedro Soler: I’ve been living for the last ten years or so in Cayambe, a small town about an hour and a half from Quito, the capital of Ecuador. It’s in the Ecuadorian Andes, near the northern border with Colombia. We live in the valley, but there are many communities up in the mountains. My partner Daniela Moreno Wray comes from a family that used to own a lot of land here, her great-grandmother was almost like a queen of this valley. When I met her, she was working on a documentary film that later became a large-scale video and audio installation, exploring tensions around land use for production and community struggles, between haciendas and indigenous peasants. The project focused on important women like Dolores Cacuango, Luisa Gómez de la Torre and Tránsito Amaguaña as an inspiration for intercultural collaboration. There is this beautiful metaphor from Tránsito : “wheat and quinoa in the same sack”- symbolizing unity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people working toward common goals like land and food sovereignty. A central aim of the project was to heal the wounds left by colonization and the hacienda system [land ownership structure that exploited indigenous communities], seeking to regenerate not just the land but also relationships. This inspired us to organize activities here, like the AgroHack in 2016. We collaborated with local government and cultural figures and also engaged with the Intercultural Community Center in La Chimba (CICTA), though initial attempts didn’t take off. We were always fascinated by La Chimba – its stunning location, its people, the deep historical and cultural significance, and also the powerful tomb of Mama Tránsito. It’s a very special place.
Please tell us more about La Chimba. How is the community organized? Who are its people, and how do they relate to the land they inhabit?
La Chimba is an indigenous community of the Kayambi people of the Kichwa nation managed by an assembly whose president and executive council are elected every 2 years. There is a strict principle of alternance. All important decisions are taken as an assembly and it also decides the application of indigenous justice. The minga or collective work is the other main organizing principle whereby all community members must devote at least one day a month, and often more, to work that benefits the community.
This area was the birthplace of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement back in the 1930s when Communist forms of organisation meshed with the ancestral indigenous forms of the ayllu or the minga. It has given birth to leaders of national and international importance, and particularly women like Dolores Cacuango (1881-1971) Luisa Gómez de la Torre (1887-1976) and Tránsito Amaguaña (1909-2009). It’s also the oldest registered inhabited area up here in the Andes, well over two thousand years ago people were already living here. It is a spectacular landscape, in the folds of the snow capped Cayambe volcano with its glaciar, a lot of water. So it has a really powerful history both recent and ancient. It also has a wonderful cultural centre called Centro Intercultural Comunitario Tránsito Amaguaña (CICTA), which was made in the restored former hacienda house.
Now there is the struggle to protect the ecosystem and peasant economies and what to do about the intensive flower greenhouses and the looming threat of climate change, manifested in the drought that affected the area last year.
In the end you managed to start a collaboration with the cultural center in La Chimba and realize The Soil Assembly #2 at their place. How did you make that happen?
I feel that the context of La Chimba brings together everything we need to be thinking about right now: soil regeneration, small-scale farming, economic survival, climate change, indigenous resistance, feminism, collaboration among women, the role of education – all of it converges here.
After many years, the opportunity presented itself to do a project by applying to a contemporary art prize in 2024. It’s actually the most important art prize in Ecuador and only 10 projects are chosen. “Tinku Uku Pacha: Asamblea del Suelo #2″ (The Soil Assembly #2) was one of only two curatorial projects chosen. This initial funding was what finally gave us the push to start working directly with the community last April. This was quite challenging at first, because I was struggling to explain to the locals what we are planning to do. They don’t really have a frame of reference. The closest thing might be the traditional dances, but not something like a conference / gathering / hybrid arts show. Unless you already know what that is, it’s hard to describe. So it took a long time – really up until the end – to transmit the understanding of what we were trying to do.
The production really took off when Daniela and her company La Divina Papaya and her project Upayaku Foundation got more deeply involved, proposing to include rural economies as a transversal factor and raising support from many different organisations and processes who are involved in regeneration and conservation. The crowdfunding in collaboration with the international Soil Assembly Network was also fundamental.
You mentioned soil regeneration and small-scale farming as two of the central elements of the Soil Assembly – are these topics you’ve been exploring and working with for many years?
Yes, it’s been a while. In the 1990s and early 2000s, I was mostly involved in digital art, audiovisuals, music festivals, CD-ROMs for interactive art, and real-time video in theater. My early work revolved around cyberculture and urban environments – hacklabs, cooperative tech spaces, and contemporary art production in cities. 2011 marked a shift. I really started to take the biological turn somehow. At that time, I was working at LABoral, an Art center, on the Atlantic coast of Spain. The area outside the center is semi-rural, somewhat abandoned, but surrounded by trees. I remember the moment clearly: it was raining and for me the rain had always been kind of ”Oh, shit! It’s raining! Like no, I won’t be able to get a taxi or have to take an umbrella, or whatever”. But this time, instead of seeing the rain as a nuisance, I suddenly appreciated it – as a plant, as earth.
For me, this was quite a shift of perspective and I began to feel that this was the direction we needed to move toward in culture but also on a planetary level. It may be generational, many peers who were previously focused on digital art or hackers started to connect with gardening, ecology, and land-based practices., but at the same time I think we are all feeling this planetary necessity. As a curator, I began to see art spaces as ways of raising sensitivity – spaces that help us perceive other realities, to feel other realities. I also think it’s really important to decentralize contemporary art, pulling it away from the dominant urban centers, and imagining a culture rooted in “a small-farm future”. The internet plays a key role here, enabling international connections, access to education and culture without always having to leave the community.
How did you get involved with “The Soil Assembly” network?
It began with translating The Laboratory Planet, a newspaper that profoundly influenced me. Issue #5, titled Alien Capitalism, explored runaway systems and techno-capitalist excesses. One day, Ewen Chardronnet, from the editorial team, reached out about a new issue, #6 – this time focused on planetary peasants and soil assemblies. I was already deep into similar topics and it felt like a synchronicity: “ wow, you guys are thinking about this, too?!”
What does the term planetary peasants signify for you?
The sixth issue of The Laboratory Planet includes a powerful diagram: the globe vs. the earth. One side represented extractivist processes, finance, industry, etc.; the other social and ecological movements, natural systems, peasant ecologies, etc. – so the Anthropocene is kind of the clash between them; a battle to the death. Planetary peasants represent a way out of this madness. A possible future, different from the techno apocalyptic inevitability of the collapse, a literally ‘down to earth’ possibility of real sustainability. I mean, this worked for thousands of years. We can tune in again. This is particularly true here in Cayambe where there is a living indigenous peasant culture and the example of Tránsito Amaguaña, the indigenous peasant woman leader who became an international reference.
The Soil Assembly #2 is also called Tinku Uku Pacha. What does it mean?
Tinku is the Kichwa word for meeting, but not necessarily peaceful, it can be a clash also. Uku means inside – it also can be used to mean inside a room, while Pacha is space-time. So in short Uku Pacha is the space-time within, but maybe it deserves a bit more explanation. In Andean cosmology, the universe is vertically divided into three layers of space-time. Uku Pacha is the inner world – associated with death, birth, the ancestors, and future generations. It’s a space of regeneration, where things are transformed and reborn. It also includes subterranean waters and it’s therefore the source of all streams, rivers and lakes. However, it is not only the inside of the earth, but also the inside of the body.
The term describes time and space, so it has a materiality such as water, minerals, fossil fuels and so on. On the other hand, it also has a metaphorical dimension: the land of the ancestors and of those who are yet to be born. The land of death and birth, where everything gets recycled. Everything goes down and comes up from there. Ever dying, ever living. In the same way soil is being built: through decomposition and renewal.
Since Uku Pacha is also the place where people are born, it’s a place of the future as well. So thinking about the ancestors means you’re actually thinking about the future.
I think it’s time to talk about what happened during the assembly. Could you tell us about the artist residencies and walk us through the 3-day program?
The program started several weeks before the actual assembly with two residencies in the CICTA: Tau Luna Acosta focused on the lithic memory of the territory – exploring stones as archives and as connectors between human and non‑human meanings and time scales. At the same time, a team led by visual artist Ronny Albuja – with programmer-designer Santiago Tapia, musician Daniel Gachet and chromatography expert Dalo Gómez – created an installation titled “Look at the soil, where no light can be seen” (Mirar el suelo, donde la luz no se ve). Dalo collected soil samples from around the community and used chromatography to reveal their hidden patterns. Ronny devised an analogue projection system while Santiago and Daniel used computer vision and Pure Data to do realtime sonification of the chroma, bringing these findings to life. This work laid the foundation for what has become the living soil lab in the CICTA, where Karen Benalcázar, a young microbiologist is currently working. We officially inaugurated the lab on May 8, after closing our first day of sessions, at the same time as the exhibitions that Ronny and Tau had developed during their residencies.
What happened during the sessions? Would you like to share some highlights?
Day One, “Regenerative Peasant Economies”, was curated by Daniela Moreno Wray and opened with a presentation by the Dutch podcaster and author Koen van Seijen, who discusses regenerative investment – framing the possibility of aligning capital flows with ecological regeneration. A pragmatic kind of introduction. Following that, we held panels featuring experiences from the Amazon and Santo Domingo. One of the most attended discussions centered on regenerative cattle ranching, because dairy farming remains the principal livelihood for many families here. We also hosted a powerful panel on women in regenerative agriculture, where several community leaders spoke about their projects and challenges. In the evening Felipe Jácome Reyes, an artist from Quito, projected a video mapping on a house in front of the cultural centre. His work layered images of Mama Tránsito’s voice and face with photos of mycelium and microscopic footage of soil organisms – a tribute to her legacy. It is a very lovely piece. Women were busy cooking inside so smoke rose up through the roof to complement the projections! We then opened the exhibition in the CICTA and guided visitors through the artists’ installations.
The second day was dedicated to “The Science and Art of the Soil”. We tried to blend artistic projects and rural art & science projects with more academic soil research. This was our main international day: every session featured simultaneous translation, and a professional streaming team captured video and sound in really good quality. Everything was recorded and is published on archive.org – so all that material is now publicly available. It got a good reception. Participants joined via Zoom or were watching the livestream on Youtube. It was going really smoothly. The day’s program was divided into four thematic blocks: ancestral‑futurism, art & rurality, art & soil and sciences of soil. In the morning, we had a nice introduction from the international soil assembly network and in between the blocks there were many breaks, a guided walk, two poems and a presentation about Ukraine’s ecovillage movement. My personal highlights were Dhamendra’s presentation about his work in India and the concerts in the evening.
Those concerts – or rather audiovisual performances – looked really amazing. Unfortunately this is not so easy to transmit to the other side of the globe. I would have loved to see them live.
I really enjoyed the Friday evening program. “Layer Layer Layer” is the name of an audiovisual event that Ronny and Santi organize in different places. This was the first rural one and it indeed had many layers. One of them was a group called Amazangas Uyarik – two brothers who work with ocarinas, ancient flutes made from earth, made from ceramics. They have this whole investigation about the material and the kind of vibrations it creates, because each flute has its own very individual sound. That was really nice. Paula Pin, Felipe Jácome Reyes, Entrañas with Santi and Ronny, Jatun Mama, all did great sets and the evening ended dancing to chicha music.
The third day was structured very differently to give space to the local community – without any presentations or panel discussions. Can you tell us how the theme “Ceremony and Celebration for Tránsito Amaguaña” unfolded during that day?
This day was entirely devoted to the local community and coincided with the annual anniversary of Mama Tránsito’s death on May 10. In the morning, we prepared a Pachamanca – which means cooking inside the earth. So fantastic. There’s a whole rituality of thanking the earth and giving something back to the earth. It’s a very beautiful collective ritual. At the same time there was also a children’s assembly: organised by Violeta Moreno Wray and Mama Uma where about 20 kids came together and shared their thoughts about Mama Tránsito. That was wonderful. Also, there were different tents, a small cinema and in the afternoon Dario Rocha, from Amazangas Uyarik, led small groups to the nearby river to make the underground waters “sing” with his ancestral clay instruments. In the afternoon, Graciela Alba – Mama Tránsito’s granddaughter – conducted a closing ritual. She brought us all together, and said such beautiful words, and really kind of closed the day for us in a very beautiful and very sensitive way.
As evening descended, copla groups began to arrive. Seven traditional singing and dancing ensembles came to compete in a contest held each year in honor of Mama Tránsito. The women sing with prominent high-pitched voices in Kichwa and Spanish, men play guitars and other instruments, and everyone dances. It’s a party, but a traditional party.
If you now look back: how did the event create a space for dialogue between ancestral knowledge and contemporary perspectives?
In Andean thought, all natural elements – mountains, rivers, stones – are alive. These entities form a complex web of relationships, and our role as humans is to maintain the balance: on the social level and on the ecological level. Of course, this has gotten very much out of hand at the moment.
During the assembly, we explored how the natural world has an agency of itself. In the ancestral futurism panel there was a great discussion about how indigenous thought informs gardening, for example concerning the times of planting and harvesting. The Chakana – an eight‑pointed cross marking solstices, equinoxes, and lunar cycles – lays out a framework about the timing of specific tasks. One presentation reflected on how this cosmovision influences life in the soil from a scientific perspective. It was a great academic-ancestral kind of mix. On Friday, we heard a powerful poem by Marina Tsaplina, a Russian‑origin poet based in the U.S. Her piece, translated and read in Kichwa and Spanish by Wayra Velasquez and Violeta Moreno Wray, called on us to “row the boats back” – symbolically reclaiming soil from colonial exploitation. That was a very powerful and poetic moment. Rolling back the colonial exploitation and destruction; not to a pristine world, but at least to a world where we can start to see more clearly and understand what’s happening around us.
There was also a more practical side of the assembly: debates around cattle farming versus agroforestry, sustainable economic models or the influence of technology on rural development. I find it fascinating how high‑speed internet can transform “neo‑peasant” existence. On Friday, about half of the participants were local and the rest were online. Can you imagine what would have been the carbon footprint of all these people flying in? Technology enabled us to connect a rural area in the highlands of Ecuador with an international community. It’s mind blowing. I think it really does give a whole other dimension to rural life. You can be a cultural worker, a knowledge worker, and you can participate in debates, know what’s going on, educate yourself, bring your thoughts and ideas into the world. I mean, you don’t have to leave your village anymore. This was unimaginable just a decade ago.
I agree! It’s really fascinating that it’s possible to attend an international event without going anywhere. Whenever there was a break in the program, I could just go out and work in the garden.
Exactly! And there were also parallel events going on in Manaus and Paris, running fantastic, smaller-scale programs. There was this beautiful moment of synchronicity, when the Manaus team shared images and impressions of the produce on a local market, just as we were settling down to our work on Thursday evening. It was great to feel this connection – kind of tuning into some sort of quantum entanglement.
How do you see the Soil Assembly evolving over the next decade? What are your hopes and dreams?
Honestly, I’m a bit of a collapsist. I think the current systems are going to fall apart. But that’s exactly why we need things like the Soil Assemblies. They can be one element in generating resilience, in giving space for the transmission of knowledge around these things – for example farming practices and inspirational projects, which can give somewhere to pick up from after the collapse. I think this has the potential to catalyze a cultural shift of our relationships with the non-human.
I’m hoping for a variety of local, grounded events that can be connected via streaming or other digital tools. Like a mycelium network. Events popping up in different places and contexts, each with their own focus, but all connected. For me, that’s certainly a vision that I would like to see happening. The energy is there, and we’re hearing from more and more people who want to host an assembly. But it has to stay grounded. Not too academic, not just urban intellectuals. The Soil Assembly acquires its full dimension when it involves actually people working with the soil, not just thinking about it or examining it. I think that dimension is very important. I really hope that we can continue this dialogue between art, culture, science, and peasants – peasant people, peasant economies.
I heard rumors about a third assembly. Do you happen to know anything about it?
Yeah, there are rumors. It seems that there are some people in Chile who are thinking about organizing something in the Atacama desert. Also it seems that the Soil Assembly will be included in the Kochi Biennale in 2026, so that’s already a good result, to be doing one in India again.
Great. I’m very much looking forward to this. Maybe a last question to close the interview: How do you personally stay grounded in your everyday life?
Getting into the soil, into gardening, has helped me a lot on a personal level. It’s helped me come to terms with the craziness of the world. There’s something deeply healing about it. And the great thing is: everyone can do it. At least everyone can make compost. Everyone has done it in some way, really. That little act of making new earth, making humus, even in the smallest, microscopic way. It’s actually real. And it’s actually beautiful. And it’s actually beneficial.
And I feel that, especially as our political options are becoming more and more limited, and our opinions feel increasingly abstract, just echoing in the void, focusing on soil and on these small, tangible actions – that’s a very optimistic space for me. It’s grounding, it’s healing. It’s a space of hope. Yes, it really is.
Read our articles on the Soil Assemblies
Watch the conferences and events of the Soil Assembly #2 Tinku Uku Pacha day 1 and day 2