Soil Assembly: Cultivating Ecologies of Learning

Published 22 August 2026 by la rédaction

What if soil became a place to gather, learn and imagine other ways of living? Across Europe and beyond, Soil Assembly is building a trans-local network that brings together artists, farmers, scientists, educators, activists and local communities around one of the most fundamental — and most threatened — foundations of life: soil.

Soil Assembly starts from a simple observation: soil is much more than a substrate for agriculture. It is a living system, a repository of biodiversity, a foundation for food and water cycles, and a place where human histories, cultures and communities intersect. To work with soil is therefore also to work with questions of climate, food, biodiversity, landscape, health and the ways societies inhabit their territories.

Rather than creating another international conference, Soil Assembly proposes a different kind of gathering. Its assemblies are distributed across territories, combining local encounters, field-based experimentation, an online community and hybrid international meetings. Each assembly is both an event and a living laboratory, rooted in the particular ecological, cultural and social conditions of its location.

The project brings together people who do not necessarily meet within conventional academic or cultural institutions: farmers and growers, artists and designers, scientists and researchers, educators and students, activists, gardeners, seed keepers, hackers, makers, landscape practitioners and local communities. What connects them is a shared interest in finding practical and imaginative ways to understand and regenerate living systems.

At the heart of the project is the idea of “living pedagogies.” First developed in 2022 at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, Soil Assembly questions the separation between learning and doing, theory and practice, school and territory. Knowledge emerges through direct engagement with places and living systems: cultivating land, observing soil, collecting seeds, mapping ecosystems, fermenting food, making compost, conducting citizen-science experiments, sharing stories and working alongside people who carry generations of situated ecological knowledge.

This approach deliberately brings different forms of knowledge into dialogue. Scientific research can meet farming traditions; artistic experimentation can meet citizen science; design can meet local memory and embodied experience. Rather than establishing a hierarchy between expert and non-expert knowledge, Soil Assembly seeks to create situations in which these forms of knowledge can interact and transform one another.

The assembly itself becomes a pedagogical space

This is particularly important at a moment when ecological crisis is accompanied by social fragmentation and a growing sense of disconnection from the places on which societies depend. Soil Assembly sees the act of assembling — gathering together, exchanging knowledge, making things collectively — as a political and cultural practice in its own right.

Its themes range from soil health and regenerative agriculture to agrobiodiversity, wetlands and watersheds, food systems and alternative forms of transport, multi-species stewardship, permaculture, mycelial thinking and what the network calls “ecological futurism.” These themes are not treated as separate disciplines but as interconnected dimensions of a wider transition from extractive to regenerative ways of living.

The network also places strong emphasis on citizen science and DIY practices. Soil observation, basic soil testing, composting, seed collection, ecological mapping and low-tech experimentation are ways of making ecological knowledge accessible beyond specialist institutions. Research becomes something that communities can participate in, document and share.

This also leads Soil Assembly into a critique of conventional art and design education. If ecological crisis is fundamentally reshaping the conditions in which we live, ecological literacy cannot remain a specialised subject added to existing curricula. It needs to become part of creative practice itself.

Soil Assembly therefore experiments with field laboratories, learning farms, residencies, workshops and immersive programmes in which artists, designers and students work directly with territories, communities and living systems. The ambition is not simply to produce environmentally themed artworks or projects, but to develop new forms of cultural education capable of responding to ecological transformation.

Soil as cultural connector

Underlying the entire network is a conception of soil as a cultural connector. Soil links biodiversity to food, water to agriculture, landscape to memory, and ecological processes to social organisation. It connects what happens beneath our feet to much larger questions about how we live together.

From this perspective, soil is both material and metaphor: a place of decomposition and regeneration, of interdependence and exchange. It invites a shift from thinking in terms of isolated individuals and disciplines towards relationships, cycles and forms of collective stewardship.

Soil Assembly calls some of these emerging practices “permacircularities” and “social fermentation.” Borrowing from permaculture, circular economies, slow food, ecological restoration and community experimentation, these concepts describe processes that cannot be reduced to a quick solution or a single project. They are about creating the conditions in which relationships, knowledge and communities can slowly develop — much like an ecosystem.

The ambition of Soil Assembly is therefore not to establish a new institution or a single model to be replicated everywhere. It is to cultivate a network of situated experiments: different territories, different communities, different forms of knowledge, connected through a shared commitment to living soils and regenerative futures.

In a world increasingly shaped by climate disruption, biodiversity loss and ecological uncertainty, the question is no longer simply how to protect the soil beneath our feet. It is how to relearn our relationship with the living systems of which we are part.

Soil Assembly proposes that one place to begin is by gathering, learning and working together — from the ground up.

Watch previous editions of Soil Assembly