Soil Saturdays

Co-curating the UK’s celebration of UN International Year of Soils

Clive Adams, co-founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World and the three-year Soil Culture initiative, invited us to animate two specially-commissioned exhibitions as part of a wider co-curation of a UK contribution to UN International Year of the Soils 2015. Our response, Soil Saturdays as part of Soil Culture at Create emerged through three months of conversations with local organisations and individuals, as well as national groups working to protect soils. The matter of living soil and food was present within the gallery, on the Soil Shrine, as part of activities, and nourishingly and colourfully manifest through freshly prepared food sourced from Bristol and its hinterland and cooked in collaboration with Daphne Lambert.

“Soil is the source of all life. Soil Saturdays is a timely celebration to remind the world that we are all children of the living soil.” Satish Kumar

With the Blue Finger Alliance we co-evolved Soils of Bristol Soil Saturday with a Walk and Talk for Soil leading to a citizen-led Policy Forum for the crafting of the UK’s first City-wide Declaration for Soil, since taken up by Glasgow. This Declaration was embedded within the legacy of Bristol 2015 Green Capital. British Green MEP Molly Scott Cato invited Touchstones to present our Soil Saturdays film and the Declaration for Soil as an artistic intervention during the Greens/EFA conference ‘Why Soil Matters? A European perspective’ held at the European Parliament in Brussels. Soil Saturdays initiative went on to receive the AWE-inspiring commendation from the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM). We were also commissioned to reflect with Clive Adams on the collaborative processes within ‘Curating the Convivial’ published in Geohumanties journal.