Tinku Uku Pacha in Ecuador: towards a second Soil Assembly in 2025
Concerned by the worries and hopes of COP 16 on biodiversity currently taking place in Cali, Colombia, the Soil Assembly network is taking the opportunity to promote Tinku Uku Pacha, the next international meeting dedicated to art, soil and indigenous knowledge, to be held at the Transito Amaguaña Intercultural Community Center in Ecuador’s upper La Chimba valley, at the foot of the magnificent Cayambe volcano. Announcement.
“The protagonist of the decisive struggle for re-existence in the Plantationocene is soil, the cradle and grave of organic life, where bodies and inorganic matter meet and exchange their properties, nurturing and destroying each other in a restless process of decay and regeneration. Populated by beings of all kinds – stones and leaves, insects, roots, water, air – soil is the stage on which the planetary drama of life and nonlife has been unfolding for the last 450 million years.”
Federico Luisetti in The Laboratory Planet #6
Almost all life on Earth depends on the soil yet 30% of the planet’s soils are currently dead and 90% are projected to be dead by 2050 if we continue on the current course of agricultural practices and climate change. Soil is now the scene of a fierce planetary battle for subsistence. Minerals, fuels, water, agriculture, carbon sinks, health and cosmovision, past and future – all these issues intersect in the Uku Pacha, the spacetime of the interior in the Andean cosmovision, where the practices and knowledge we need to live and die well in the Anthropocene are to be found.
Soil Assembly #1 was held in Kochi, Kerala, in India in 2023 with the aim of promoting awareness of the soil through art, science and peasant and indigenous knowledge. Soil Assembly #2 will be held in May 2025 in La Chimba, Ecuador, a rural community in the Andes, where the great peasant and indigenous leader Tránsito Amaguaña lived and died. She is the inspiration for the gathering and our Uku Pacha guide, emissary of the ancestors, of the soil and of the struggle, reminding us of who the enemy is and of the goals of popular unity, indigenous culture and access to livelihoods.
In La Chimba there is a center dedicated to her memory, to indigenous resistance, interpretation of the territory and intercultural creation: the Centro Intercultural Comunitario Tránsito Amaguaña (CICTA), founded in 2009 by presidential decree with the impulse of the community. In the month of April 2025 there will be two artistic residencies, Ronny Albuja (Ecu) and Tau Luna Acosta (Co), who will work on themes of soil, territory and communities. Ronny Albuja – together with his team Santiago Tapia, Daniel Gachet and TierraCroma – will be focused on sonifying soil chromatographies sampled from the territory, interpreting the circular images through digital and ancestral technologies. Tau Luna Acosta’s proposal is entitled “Metabolic alliances to digest a decaying world”, a phrase that sums up very well the general objectives of Tinku Uku Pacha.
Tinku Uku Pacha: Asamblea del Suelo
The exhibitions resulting from the residencies will be inaugurated on May 8, 2025, the first day of Tinku Uku Pacha: Asamblea del Suelo #2. This first day, starting in the morning and streamed by Internet, will be curated by La Divina Papaya. It will focus on the peasant economy and the search for an agriculture that can regenerate the soil and, at the same time, economically sustain peasant families. Cattle and flower farms, currently the economic base of the communities, do not maintain healthy soils or generate food sovereignty. The great challenge is to find forms of economy for the agricultural transition.
In rich countries, the vast majority of the population has little or no contact with the land: in Germany, for instance, only 2% work in agriculture. In Ecuador, a large part of the population still works in the countryside: despite constant emigration, it still represents 30% of national employment. Today the heirs of Tránsito Amaguaña, the indigenous women, with their arts of subsistence are still here, frugal and inventive, with strength to fight and time to party.
The encounter between peasant and neo-peasant, between urban and rural, man and woman, economy and subsistence, human and more than human, is now crucial for the soil and with it our collective future, our capacity for resistance and our good living. These are the alliances that must be woven to ensure the transmission of the arts of subsistence and care of life.
Art can contribute, document, provoke and suggest. Imagine new economies, open up senses, sensations, comprehension and possibilities for progress according to the new/old rhythms of culture that must emerge in a post-growth and post-extractivist civilization. Unlimited imagination within the physical limits of the planet. Just as food supply chains have to be shortened, so does the access to spaces of culture and memory, nourishing and strengthening local and planetary communities.
The second day of Tinku Uku Pacha, May 9, 2025, brings together a wide variety of voices and visions, countries and continents, to share views on soil and planetary peasantry, in an international assembly dedicated to the science, art and politics of soil. Leading international and local thinkers, leaders, peasants and artists, contribute to the debate during the day. As with every day, the activities will be webcast with simultaneous translation and shared directly with parallel events in other spaces around the world. Each evening a video mapping and sound environment will be presented, voices from the past and future, resonating around the courtyard of the CICTA and circulating on the white walls of the buildings.
On Saturday May 10th 2025, as on every May 10th, the community of La Chimba celebrates the commemoration of Mama Tránsito Amaguaña with a ceremony. This year, under the authority of the President of the Confederation of the Kayambi People, Denisse de La Cruz, and Carlos Alba, President of the Community of La Chimba, indigenous women leaders from all over the country are invited to share their visions and leadership, creating agendas and tracing paths for the defense of life and peasant and indigenous resistance. After the midday “pambamesa”, where food and drink are shared, the communities participate in a contest of “coplas”, the songs of the Kayambi women, with cash prizes and a celebrity jury. In the evening concerts of artists from this territory: Ñukanchic Taki, Jatun Mama and DJ Entrañas.
The meeting closes on Sunday, May 11, 2025 with a guided walk through the territory of La Chimba – Yakuchimba, the braid of water – and a final assembly to share impressions, desires and coordination for the future.
Everyone is welcome online or in person to participate in Tinku Uku Pacha: Soil Assembly #2. There are worlds within this world where other futures grow.
To know more about the community that will host the Soil Assembly in Ecuador.
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