From the archive
18 Sep 2026
At the end of a hot August, around two hundred people spent three days at Kerminy, an artistic and agricultural farm in South Finistère. They came for a local Soil Assembly organised around the questions already present in this Breton watershed. The gathering belonged to a Soil Assembly network begun in 2022, which links one international event each year with shorter assemblies held close to the places concerned.
Kerminy had been forming that place since 2020. Artist-farmers live there all year with donkeys, cattle and sheep; students, teachers, researchers, artists and activists pass through. The cultivated ground sits among hedges, trees and springs, and the equipment ranges from a cider press and sickles to seed mixers and low-carbon seeders and mowers. The estate lies roughly twenty kilometres from the sea in the Aven watershed, whose streams reach the Aven and Bélon estuaries.
Nearly eighty people joined the morning plenary, facilitated by Patrick Degeorges. Leila Chakroun led a session titled “Half-Farmer / Half-X”, while the wider programme moved between practical workshops, screenings and performances. Kerminy resident Malo Legrand presented a ceramics work using wild clay gathered inland at Argoat and shaped on the farm. It was to have been fired in a kiln made on the foreshore from local material, with the incoming tide interrupting the burn. Fire restrictions stopped that part, and the firing was postponed.
The marine edge framed the whole weekend. On Friday, Ewen Chardronnet and Maya Minder’s Umi no Oya traced nori cultivation in Japan’s Ariake Sea and the post-war use of oyster shells in improving production. On Sunday, the assembly moved to the Château de Bélon Oyster Farm for another film by the pair, made with researcher Christine Ewers, about the native European flat oyster. Once recorded at 1,196 reef sites across Europe, it now supplies only about 2 per cent of the continent’s oysters. The assembly closed with a tasting at Bélon.
For a local soil assembly, choose one working landscape and trace it to the water it feeds. Bring together a facilitator, a farmer or gardener, and someone making with local materials for one weekend: one plenary, one hands-on session, one visit downstream. Twenty people with responsibilities in the place are more useful than a large audience.
Makery · Read the source