Assemblée des sols, Kerminy, Brittany, 28-30 August: cultivating and circulating – from land to sea
The soil is a living milieu, shaped by water, roots and animals as much as by our own gestures. Around it, knowledge, tools, seeds and stories circulate. A seed travels, a tool passes from one worksite to another; a way of cultivating, maintaining a hedgerow or working with wood encounters scientific research or an artistic practice.
These passages allow know-how to be transmitted, but also to evolve through contact with new experiences.
The richness of a territory also lies in what these circulations make possible: a plot of land becomes a field of inquiry, a hedgerow becomes a school, a shared tool connects several practices, an agricultural gesture opens onto research or creation.
The Soil Assembly at Kerminy seeks to foster these encounters across the Aven and Bélon watersheds, so that the diversity of knowledge and practices can strengthen our ability to understand our environments, adapt to them and act together, from land to sea.
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Program
Friday, August 28
Kerminy — Rosporden (Fr)
PRELUDE: 9:30 pm — Opening screening
Umi no Oya – Ewen Chardronnet & Maya Minder (60’38”, 2025)
A filmed journal in which Ewen Chardronnet and Maya Minder explore the legacy of British phycologist Kathleen Drew-Baker, who in 1949 identified the symbiotic relationship between nori seaweed and oysters, helping to enable the development of nori aquaculture in post-war Japan. She is now revered in the Shinto tradition as Umi no Oya — the Mother of the Sea.
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Saturday, August 29
Kerminy — Rosporden (Fr)
10:00 am — Welcome
Welcome, coffee and registration of spontaneous contributions.
10:30 am — Kerminy: A Milieu of Practices
Welcome address by Marina Pirot, introducing the context of the site and the artistic, agricultural and collective practices developing there.
Marina Pirot is an artist, coordinator and co-founder of Kerminy. She will introduce the context of the site and the artistic, agricultural and collective practices that are developing there.
10:45 am — Why a Soil Assembly?
Introduction by Ewen Chardronnet, Myriad / Art2M / Soil Assembly.
What do we want to circulate, transmit and reinvent together today?
Ewen Chardronnet is an interdisciplinary artist-writer and co-initiator of Soil Assembly (SoilAssembly.net). He will present the approach and international network of the Soil Assemblies.
11:00 am–12:30 pm — How to assemble?
What does it mean to assemble? How can a territory become a place where knowledge, practices and experiences are shared and transmitted?
Facilitated by Patrick Degeorges, the discussion will bring together several experiences in which learning takes place through investigation, practice, encounter and situated experience:
- École sauvage at Kerminy with the art schools of Brittany — Raphaële Jeune
- the École-Territoire network, starting from the École de Loire — David gé Bartoli
- the international Soil Assembly network — Ewen Chardronnet
- Kerminy en commun, a collective process accompanying the future of the site and its artistic, agricultural, educational and cooperative activities — Patrick Degeorges
Patrick Degeorges is a philosopher and co-founder of IHEPAT (Institute of Advanced Studies for the Practices and Arts of Transformation). He develops practices of cohabitation connected to the transformation of environments and their habitability.
Raphaële Jeune holds a PhD in aesthetics and teaches art history and theory at the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne (EESAB).
David gé Bartoli is a philosopher and lecturer at the University of Tours. Together with Sophie Gosselin, he co-authored Le Toucher du monde (Dehors, 2019) and La Condition terrestre (Seuil, 2022).
2:00–4:00 pm — INHABITING OUR SOILS
Joanne Clavel & Violeta Salvatierra
A body-based workshop inviting participants to reconnect with living soils and the multiple entities that inhabit them through movement-based experiments.
Joanne Clavel is a researcher in ecological humanities and a CNRS research fellow at the Laboratoire des Dynamiques Sociales et Recompositions des Espaces. Originally trained as an ecologist and also a dance researcher, she coordinates the CNRS Soilscape project.
Violeta Salvatierra is an associate researcher at the “Danse, Geste et Corporéité” laboratory of Paris 8 University. A Rolfing® practitioner, she also works in care and social support environments.
2:00–5:00 pm — VILLAGE OF PRACTICES
Workshops, demonstrations, sales, agricultural and craft practices, research, artworks, visits and farmers’ discussions.
Spontaneous proposals can also join the programme during the day.
* LISTENING TO PLANTS
Laurent Vandanjon
How do plants respond to light, variations in soil and temperature, or sound frequencies? The sonification of their electrical activity offers a form of plant biophony.
Laurent Vandanjon is an engineer and PhD in science, and a lecturer-researcher at Université Bretagne Sud, within the Marine Biotechnology and Chemistry Laboratory (LBCM – EMR CNRS).
* THE BOISILLER WORKSHOP
Mérovée Dubois & Franck Viel
A collection of old tools, restored or made using wood from the Kerminy forest, for collective work sites, bringing together rural gestures and stories that have often been forgotten.
Mérovée Dubois is a visual artist. His practice takes landscape and its transformations, ancestral practices, legends and rituals as its material.
Franck Viel, a specialist in assisted natural regeneration for the restoration of hedgerows, will work with Mérovée Dubois to activate the tools of the wood-working workshop around hedgerow practices.
* FILER BELLE-ÎLE
Lauriane Daubigné
A knitting workshop working with the wool of Kerminy’s Belle-Île sheep.
Lauriane Daubigné is a visual artist whose practice develops through the long duration of farming gestures, textiles and vernacular know-how.
* DRY HEDGE & PLEACHED HEDGE
Mérovée Dubois & Franck Viel
The pleached hedge reactivates a traditional technique of interweaving living trees. The dry hedge makes it possible to store dead wood while creating refuges for insects and small mammals.
* GUSANO
Malo Legrand
Useful sculptures and agricultural objects inspired by the ollas, porous jars traditionally used for water-efficient irrigation, and paying tribute to the essential role of earthworms in structuring living soils.
Malo Legrand is an artist-farmer, trained in art and horticulture. He has lived at Kerminy since 2024, where he is “farming” his artistic practice.
* INFRATERRA
Dominique Leroy & Tony Robinet
INFRATERRA is an artistic project exploring soil as a living and sensitive milieu through listening to underground vibrations.
Dominique Leroy, artist-farmer and coordinator and co-founder of Kerminy, develops a practice between sound art, music, research, sensors and transduction.
Tony Robinet is an associate professor at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and a researcher at the Biology of Aquatic Organisms and Ecosystems laboratory (MNHN/CNRS), at the Concarneau Marine Station.
* CYCLO-FARM
Nina Crouzet & Malo Legrand
Cyclo-Farm is the Kerminy farming workshop, initiated in 2020 by the duo (n) — Marina Pirot and Dominique Leroy. The project develops a sensitive, aesthetic and relational approach to seasonal cultivation.
Malo Legrand and Nina Crouzet, artist-farmers at Kerminy, will present a stall selling vegetables, flowers and herbs grown on site.
* CYCLO-TOOLS
Lison Rigault
Lison Rigault presents pieces from the Cyclo-tools collection, at the intersection of farming tools, reuse and low-tech fabrication.
Lison Rigault is a student in ecological product design at the Pôle Supérieur de Design de La Souterraine.
* VERGER SOCIAL CLUB
Olivier Heinry
Launch of the collective orchard nursery at Kerminy, conceived as a vehicle for transmission, varietal autonomy and the local production of hardy fruit trees.
Olivier Heinry is a permaculturist involved in agroforestry as a means of reclaiming territories, particularly peri-urban ones. He is the designer of the Kerminy orchard.
* GRAINES DE LIBERTÉ — Hadoù ar Frankiz
Presentation of a selection of varietal creations based on population seeds by the Breton cooperative Graines de Liberté – Hadoù ar Frankiz, which works on the selection of seed varieties free from proprietary rights.
* THE SCYTHE AND OTHER TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY
Sébastien & Charlotte Furic — Faucheureuse collective
Sébastien and Charlotte Furic, farmers, will share their practices for maintaining meadows and wetlands and caring for the watershed. They will present the hand tools used on their farm, particularly the scythe, as well as the experience of the Faucheureuse collective.
* TRANSMITTING THE GESTURES
Jean-Bernard & Laurence Huon — Ferme de Penfrat
Jean-Bernard and Laurence Huon preserve and transmit valuable knowledge of traditional agricultural techniques, animal traction using oxen, and an extensive collection of agricultural tools dating from before mechanisation.
* COMPOSTING & MULCHING
A stand dedicated to composting, mulching, natural gardening and practices that nourish the soil.
* PLANTS THAT WANT US WELL
A travelling exhibition inviting visitors to recognise wild plants growing along the paths of southern Finistère and discover their uses and benefits.
* TALKS
3:00 pm — HALF-FARMER, HALF-X
Farmers’ discussions and contributions from the territory
Leila Chakroun opens a reflection on farmers who combine agricultural activity with other professions or activities in order to construct viable forms of life.
Leila Chakroun is a lecturer in geography at Université Paris Cité / LADYSS. She holds a PhD in environmental sciences and has conducted research into farms inspired by permaculture in Switzerland and Japan.
4:00 pm — Pedagogies from living milieus
What forms of transmission can emerge from a territory, its practices and the environments that compose it?
This discussion will share several experiences in which learning takes place through investigation, practice, encounter and situated experience:
- École sauvage at Kerminy with the art schools of Brittany — Raphaële Jeune
- the École-Territoire network, starting from the École de Loire — David gé Bartoli
- the international Soil Assembly network — Ewen Chardronnet
- Kerminy en commun, a collective process accompanying the future of the site’s artistic, agricultural, educational and cooperative activities — Patrick Degeorges
5:00 pm — Plenary assembly
What future for the Soil Assembly in Brittany?
A time to bring together what has circulated throughout the day and imagine possible future forms for the Soil Assembly in Brittany.
Participants will be invited to share proposals and imagine forms of cooperation.
The Kerminy team will present the PAC — Politique d’Alliance Contributive (Contributive Alliance Policy), an experimental framework for putting knowledge, tools and resources into circulation and collectively imagining ways of cultivating, creating and caring for environments.
Animation: Patrick Degeorges
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7:30 pm — VERMEILLE — Florence Jou & Serge Teyssot-Gay
A literary concert in which voice and guitar meet around drought in the Vermeille coast, burnt vineyards, and the resistance of humans and non-humans in the face of the decomposition of the world. Vermeille is raw energy and electric poetry.
Florence Jou is a writer and poet-performer. Her work develops narratives and performative forms around climate disruption, ecology and the transformation of territories. She is the author of several books, including Vermeille (L’Attente, 2026).
Serge Teyssot-Gay is a guitarist and composer whose musical practice moves between rock, improvisation and contemporary music, notably through projects such as Interzone and Zone Libre.
Vermeille is the stage extension of Florence Jou’s first novel, published in April 2026 by Éditions de l’Attente. The literary concert exists both as a duo with Serge Teyssot-Gay and as a performance with Interzone, the duo formed by Teyssot-Gay and oud player Khaled Aljaramani.
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8:30 pm — Shared Meal
Music by Dick and Guy-Charles, country music from Finistère.
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9:30 pm — POUTR. — Concert-performance by Quentin Aurat.
Poutr. is a semi-improvised solo musical performance built around a DIY instrument played through rubbing, plucking and percussion.
Quentin Aurat is an artist whose work develops around moving image, interactivity, sound creation, radio, instrument-making and hacking.
10:00 pm — DJ SET
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SUNDAY 30 AUGUST
HUÎTRIÈRES DU CHÂTEAU DE BÉLON, RIEC-SUR-BÉLON
2:30 pm — ENCOUNTER — Flat oysters: from abundance to scarcity
Introduction by Ewen Chardronnet to the screening of an interview with Dr Christine Ewers.
Until the nineteenth century, the European flat oyster formed vast natural reefs. It is estimated that European oyster reefs once covered at least 1.7 million hectares. Today, these former large-scale reefs have largely disappeared.
Christine Ewers is an evolutionary biologist and head of the Phylogenomics Section at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change in Hamburg. She has worked on the genomic analysis of oyster shell collections at the Zoological Museum of Kiel.
4:30 pm — DOUAR TAN MOR — EARTH · FIRE · SEA
Performance by Malo Legrand
This experimental ceramic project creates connections between terrestrial and marine worlds by using clay collected in the Argoat — inland Brittany — which is collected, prepared and shaped at Kerminy before being taken to the Armor, the coast.
For the duration of a tide, a primitive kiln is constructed on the foreshore from locally available materials. The ceramics are transformed through contact with fire, air, salt and the tides.
The rising water interrupts the process at around 5 pm: the landscape itself becomes an actor in the transformation.
5:00 pm — CLOSING DRINK & OYSTER TASTING
At the Huîtrières du Château de Bélon, Port de Bélon, Riec-sur-Bélon.
Free admission.
