Paper short abstract:

In response to the global call for the care of soils, and to create new cultural aesthetics of soil care practices, Glocal Worm-ing project explores, through design, ways to nurture mutual human-soil relations together with earthworms in order to enhance multispecies co-existences in cities.

Paper long abstract:

Fertile soil is currently being depleted faster than it can be renewed, a crisis referred to as Peak Soil. Soils are now on the list of environmental issues that need global care and caring for them entails caring for those who depend on them. Earthworms are one of the symbionts of soil life and are necessary for living soils.

Considering the urgency of creating new cultural aesthetics of soil care practices and expanding the notion of more-than-human sociality, Glocal Worm-ing project explores, through design, ways to nurture mutual human-soil relations together with earthworms and active citizen-participation to enhance multispecies co-existences in cities. The project seeks to provide emergent soil care practices in public spaces with earthworms. Earthworms as companion species to humans open up the need of building relational networks by applying soil care practices in order to care for the Earth, each other, and other living beings.

The design research approaches include multispecies ethnography, participatory action research, agonistic design through interventions, and workshops. A key design harvest of the project is the Earthworm Manifesto as a transformative storyline weaving relations of humans with the world of the earthworms and the underground.

The project was exhibited from 2022 to 2023 in various exhibitions such as the Museum of Nature South Tyrol and the Long Night Research at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and encourages visitors to encounter earthworms as kins of humans, weaving and co-creating facts and fables (SF) to build other stories, relations and other worlds to come.