14/07/2026
Last week, at the 11th Living Knowledge Conference in Gdańsk (7–10 July 2026), Mathieu Goradesky presented the contribution:
LOESS Stories from the Subsoil: Art-Based Storytelling to Build Solidarity, Soil Health, and Community Resilience
Developed within the Horizon Europe LOESS project, Stories from the Subsoil explores how audiovisual storytelling can become an integral part of community-based research rather than simply a tool for communicating its results.
The project gives voice to people who study, work with, protect and care for soil—scientists, farmers, educators, environmental activists and citizens—bringing together forms of knowledge that rarely share the same narrative space. Their stories reveal soil not only as a biophysical system, but as a living commons where environmental health, community wellbeing, memory, justice and care intersect.
The presentation reflected on the potential of art-based research to make scientific knowledge accessible without simplifying its complexity, while creating spaces where research, lived experience and emotional engagement can meet. In this perspective, storytelling becomes more than dissemination: it becomes a process of knowledge co-production, capable of strengthening relationships among researchers, communities and institutions, and of cultivating new forms of solidarity.
For Controvento, audiovisual documentation is not the final stage of a research project but an essential component of the research process itself—a way of observing educational practices, documenting social transformation and making invisible processes of learning and community building visible.
We would like to thank the organisers of the 11th Living Knowledge Conference for providing such an inspiring environment for dialogue on participatory research, Science Shops and knowledge co-creation, and all participants whose reflections enriched this exchange.
