Blauer Salon
Winter term 2025
Taste of the Land

Workshop Mini Composter and Soil Quality

Guests: Bio Design Lab Team of HfG

This presentation is part of the workshop “Mini Composter and Soil Quality,” organized by the Living Library Team and the Bio Design Lab at the HfG, in collaboration with the ZKM. The two events complement each other and show how close our relationship to the soil is and what role it plays in the global ecosystem.

Taste of the Land

Director: Adam Loften, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee | USA 2024 | 70 min | DCP | Original version with English subtitles | with Kalyanee Mam

In the Khmer language, the root word for “nature” and “country” is cheate, meaning “taste”: to truly understand the essence of the land, one must know it through the senses. Since fleeing Cambodia with her family during the Khmer Rouge regime, and a genocide which devastated an entire culture and displaced millions of people from their homes, award-winning documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. This film follows her to the landscapes of her homeland—changing through deforestation, industrialization, urbanization and development—where she has spent years tenderly documenting the disappearing, relational ways of life held within them. As she comes to know these places not only through the lens of her camera, but through the intimate relationships she forms with the landscapes and people whose stories she shares, Kalyanee awakens an ancestral memory of the taste of the land that lies within.


The Bio Design Lab is a laboratory for sustainable materials and design research at the HfG, where the Living Library project is based as a transdisciplinary exploration of materials and circular design. The workshop “Mini Composter and Soil Quality” focuses on soil and its important role in the ecosystem and questions how humans can also contribute. It explores ways in which sustainable and innovative design practices can help maintain healthy soil. The workshop teaches participants how to build a worm composter and discover its nutrient-rich soil as an effective plant fertilizer. As part of the ongoing research for the Living Library project, the workshop also addresses local soil structures and their nutrient composition. The ultimate goal is for participants to learn how to reuse soil compost as a sustainable plant fertilizer.


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