Beneath the Surface

How Can the Arts and Sciences Contribute to a Just Transition?

Interdisciplinary space for artistic and scientific exploration hosted within the Sustainability Science Forum 2025
26 November, Eventforum Bern

13:15 - 14:30

Language: English

Organisation: re-source | Sustainability in the Arts (ZHdK)

In collaboration with:
Alisha Dutt Islam, MA Transdisciplinary Studies, ZHdK
Sara Di Bert, Doctoral Student, D-USYS, ETH

Promising ways to explore the networks that sustain agriculture are urgently needed as we face climate change and growing social inequalities in food systems. Connecting the arts and sciences provides a path forward, offering perspectives that help us observe, experience, and reflect on these systems in new ways.

Art and science are often seen as opposites – one focused on aethestics and expression, the other on analysis and evidence. Science traces processes we cannot see directly, while art makes these processes tangible through stories, images, and experiences that connect data to lived realities – yet both share a common impulse: to question, investigate, and to make sense of the world.

In this session, agriculture is our point of entry, with a particular focus on root systems. Roots not only anchor plants but form complex networks that exchange nutrients, water, and signals, linking crops to fungi, insects, and microorganisms, and shaping soil fertility and ecosystem stability. They also carry cultural significance, reflecting the practices, traditions, and histories that ground farming in place.

A transition toward a net-zero society requires attention to what lies underground. Technological innovation alone cannot secure resilient food systems; just and sustainable futures depend on re-rooting farming practices, social habits, and cultural approaches in ways that respect ecological limits.

In Beneath the Surface, two guests – one from the arts, one from the sciences – present their approaches. Where their perspectives intersect, agriculture emerges as a living system of exchange, biological and cultural alike. Participants are invited to engage with methods and technologies, discuss their potential, and contribute insights that strengthen the role of the collaboration between the arts and sciences in addressing societal challenges.