- Centre for Future Thinking, UK
Our work with the Centre for Future Thinking evolves around reconnecting food, land and healing. This embraces residencies, pedagogical exchanges and artistic interventions, such as World Soil Day. The Centre also sponsored our participation at The Living Soil Forum which engaged key players in the agriculture system to secure and restore healthy soils globally. Our response was to host a Living Soil Shrine at the heart of the gathering.
The themes of the Forum were defining the global soil; discovering the local; dreaming what is possible; tapping into collective abundance; planning the next harvest. These themes were manifest in the elements that were offered each day to the shrine – water, stone, clay, humus, local soils, a clover plant, fresh vegetables, honey, a sourdough leaven, artisan bread, other fermentation processes, composts at varying stages, a platter of seeds, and a cowpat. The Shrine became an important place of exchanges around soil guardianship between different fields of expertise and experience. For the closing ceremony, Vandana Shiva took sprouting seedlings from the Shrine as a symbol of future flourishing.
“
The Living Soil Shrine drove home to me the importance of expressing our gratitude to the forces of nature, which support us and all life on Earth. Art and ritual are key in healing the human-nature relationship. I have been a soil scientist all my life and it is such a relief to find this art here.
Forum participant
“
