Where can we land? This is the question that is at the core of the 2026 year-programme YOU AND I ARE EARTH. During the workshop AN UNFINISHED ODE TO MUD, thirty-five groups from grades five and six will work together over three months on a single growing and transient landscape. In the RADIUS education space, a living whole of earth, clay and mud slowly emerges. We approach these materials not as something formed solely by humans, but as elements with which we, as humans, are connected. Mud, earth, clay, water and wind react, shift, dry, break and connect.

AN UNFINISHED ODE TO MUD offers pupils space to reflect on what it means to make the world liveable. Not only for humans, but for the entire fabric of life of which we are a part. During the programme, pupils visit the group exhibition DISMANTLE THE ANTHROPOCENE. There, we explore other stories about earth and landscape, beyond a human-centred perspective. In these stories, the soil is not a passive substrate, but an active partner in the creation of places, structures, habitats and traces. The workshop focuses on materiality, ecological awareness and relational thinking. Earth is an ideal starting point for this. Working with messy, open creative processes, also known as productive mess or constructive chaos, stimulates imagination and exploratory learning. ‘We might explore the mess to appreciate what possibilities it still holds’, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing says.