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In 2025, Piksel Festival gathers artists, researchers, and critical thinkers in Bergen for a SPECIAL PROGRAM dedicated to soils—an element often overlooked, yet fundamental to all terrestrial life. Under the title Perma/Soils – Interdisciplinary Strategies for Soil Recuperation, the event explores ecological challenges, unsustainable sociopolitical structures, technological means of repair, and the fragile conditions for soil life in the Anthropocene.
The prefix “perma”, central to Piksel 2025, offers a conceptual framework for this discussion. It invokes permaculture, the agricultural practice of imitating ecosystems; permacomputing, a movement for sustainable digital practices; permafrost, a fragile and rapidly changing ecological system; and permacrisis, the contemporary sense of ongoing instability.
This program brings together art, architecture, ecology, and technology to spark new imaginaries and practical solutions for a sustainable future. By situating soils at the center of ecological and digital debates, Perma/Soils – Interdisciplinary Strategies for Soil Recuperation, highlights the deep interconnections between land, community, and infrastructure—from contaminated mines in Norway to the infrastructures of the cloud.
SEMINAR @Natural History Museum of Bergen
https://25.piksel.no/mud_event/seminar-perma-soils/
10-13h Featured Speakers & Contributions
10:05 Dr. Davina Kaur Patel (Researcher)
Soil, migration, and belonging in Punjab, India—diasporic connections to land.
10:40 Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith (Artist)
American, French-naturalized visual artist exploring the poetic intersections between analog and biological media.
11:15 Ewen Chardronnet (Chief Editor makery.info, More-than-Planet EU Project)
On agriculture’s effects on algae growth and shoreline contamination.
11:50 Maya Minder (Artist & Fermenter, Hackteria, Soil Assembly)
Fermentation practices and global community projects for soil recovery, with case studies from Ecuador.
12:30 Marina Otero Verzier (Architect, Wheelwright Prize, Harvard GSD 2022)
At Perma/Soils, she addresses the entanglement of soil and computation, showing how infrastructures of extraction and infrastructures of data are deeply interconnected.
PERMA/SOILS Screenings
https://25.piksel.no/mud_event/screening-perma-soils/
14-16h Screening and happening seaweed & oyster bar by Maya Minder & Ewen Chardronnet
• Compost Computacional, Marina Otero Verzier
• Umi No Oya (ウミノヲヤ) – The Mother of the Sea by Maya Minder & Ewen Chardronnet
The seminar also pays tribute to Shigeatsu Hatakeyama (1943–2024) — oyster farmer, environmentalist, and author of “The Forest in Love with the Sea.” His life’s work reminds us that the vitality of marine life begins inland, in the forests and rivers that feed the sea.
A seaweed & oyster bar during the screening session continues this reflection through taste — celebrating the symbiosis between ecosystems, species, and sensibilities from the hands of Maya Minder and Ewen Chardronnet.
PERMA/SOILS Exhibition @Studio207 / Piksel
https://25.piksel.no/mud_event/perma-soils/
Perma/Soils is a collaboration with the University of Oslo and rooted in the research project Anthropogenic Soils, Recuperating Human-Soil Relationships on a Troubled Planet. Special thanks to Ursula Münster and Nora Vaage for their encouraging work.
Supported by UiO, The Research Council of Norway, University of Bergen UiB and the Universitetsmuseet i Bergen.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Universitetsmuseet i Bergen, Muséplassen 3, 5007 Bergen, Norge, Bergen, Norway
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