Let Your Futures Take Root
Shared Grounds
The way we treat soil today will shape the future of our climate, biodiversity, food security, and global justice. “Shared Grounds” is an evolving installation, which continuously changes with your contributions. With each vision and prototype added by you, it grows into a collective representation of possible futures.
Photo: Jan Windszus
Soil is habitat, food source, water reservoir and carbon sink. It supports our cities, nourishes our fields, filters our drinking water and yet rarely takes centre stage in public debate. Across the globe, healthy soils are under threat from erosion, sealing, intensive farming, poor irrigation practices, and over-fertilisation. Furthermore, access to land is unequally distributed – both between countries and within them. The way we treat soil today will shape the future of our climate, biodiversity, food security, and global justice. With “Shared Grounds”, the Futurium invites you to explore this complex topic in a participatory way – through dialogue with the exhibit and in accompanying workshops. The evolving installation, which continuously changes with your contributions, serves as a playground for thoughts, ideas, and models.
A large wheel of fortune, located right next to the installation, offers an entry point into the complex topic of “soil”. It leads to specific themes and challenges for you to engage with, ranging from soil life, water stress, microplastics in soil to the role of robotics and machines in the future of agriculture. Thought-provoking questions, such as “Imagine you’re an earthworm – what would you tell humans?”, invite you to discuss and reflect.
For workshop participants the experience goes one step further: The wheel of fortune becomes a starting point for deeper engagement with the topic. Each group spins the wheel at the installation and receives their own scenario and challenge – for example, design a “humus power plant,” that you can then build right away in the workshop area of the Futurium Lab.
You are invited to share your own perspectives and ideas, actively shaping the installation. Using natural materials such as felt, jute, wood, corrugated cardboard, and cork you develop concepts into sketches and finally into physical objects that showcase possible new futures. With every piece made, the installation in the Futurium Lab steadily expands.
The workshops and installation were developed by Archimedes Exhibitions (AMDX) in Berlin. As Christina Rühlmann (AMDX) explains:
The goal is to create a space of possibilities where people can form their own opinions, ask questions, and begin to work with their own future.
The aim is not to find definitive answers, but to open up a diversity of perspectives and to inspire you to take an active role in shaping the future you want to see.
