From the archive
17 Sep 2026
The plan had been to fire the pots on the shore. Malo Legrand, a resident artist at the Ferme de Kerminy in southern Finistère, had dug wild clay from the inland Argoat and built a primitive kiln on the foreshore from materials found on the spot. The rising tide was meant to interrupt the firing and mark the pieces. Then came the summer's fire restrictions, and the performance was postponed; the pots will eventually be scattered in the Bélon river instead, left to take on whatever the water gives them.
Legrand's unfinished kiln was one strand of the Assemblée des sols, a three-day gathering in late August that drew some two hundred people to Kerminy at the tail of an overheated summer. The farm, founded in 2020, describes itself as an artwork and a territory at once: artist-farmers in residence, passing students and researchers, donkeys, an ox, sheep, hedgerows and springs. The programme mixed open assemblies - the morning plenary drew around eighty - with hands-on workshops, film screenings and performances.
Fittingly for a farm twenty kilometres from the sea, inside the watershed of the Aven, the assembly opened and closed with salt water. The opening film followed nori cultivation in Japan, where the oyster farmers of the Ariake Sea still honour an English biologist each year for introducing, in the difficult post-war years, a technique pairing nori with oyster shell that let their ancestors multiply their productivity. The closing session moved to the oyster farm at the Château de Bélon, and to the flat oyster, Ostrea edulis.
That oyster once formed reefs across Europe; a recent historical survey counted 1,196 documented reef locations, many of them French. Since Pacific oysters were introduced in the 1970s, the flat oyster has shrunk to roughly 2 per cent of European production, with Bélon among the few places still raising it - hence the tasting in the château park. The assembly is one node in Soil Assembly, a network running since 2022 that holds one international gathering a year and several local ones, each organised around the questions its own territory is already asking.
A local soil assembly needs a host place with a working question, a date, and a reason for people to handle the ground rather than just discuss it. The Soil Assembly network accepts short-circuit local events alongside its annual international one; two hundred people at a farm is the upper bound, not the entry ticket.
Makery · Read the source