Earth School: Sowing Futures, Harvesting Value

Earth School envisioned by artist Kirstine Roepstorff presents its third edition, organised in collaboration with curator Fatoş Üstek for the Alserkal Avenue Public Art Commissions 2025. It is grounded in the belief that values similar to knowledge, matter, and spirit are regenerative, interconnected, and constantly evolving.

Through workshops, discussions, and artistic interventions, this year’s theme, Sowing Futures, Harvesting Value, delves into how skills, materials, cosmologies, and imagination can be nurtured to create shared prosperity. Using the metaphors of sowing and harvesting, the programme reimagines value as an ongoing, emergent process shaped by exchange, care, and interdependence. With contributions from Uzma Rizvi, A.A. Murakami, and Aruba Khalid, it envisions value as relational, regenerative, and continuously evolving.

Earth School is designed as a gathering space rather than a traditional symposium, weaving together conversations, introspection, workshops, and shared meals. It seeks to shift our focus from transactional thinking to transformative relationships, from extraction to cultivation, and from the illusion of permanence to the practice of renewal. As the limitations of finite resources become increasingly evident, it gestures toward alternative economies rooted in trust, imagination, and spirit. It invites us to reconsider how futures are sown, value is harvested, and mutual flourishing can be restored in a shared world.

Date: 16 November 2025

Time: 11AM - 3PM

Venue: WH50, Project Space, Alserkal Avenue

Kirstine Roepstorff (b. 1972, Denmark) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intricate relationship between humanity, spirituality, and the natural world. At the core of her practice is a critical examination of the "in-between" spaces - where personal transformation intersects with collective consciousness. Roepstorff interrogates how history, politics, and existential realities shape our perceptions of time, space, and identity, often revisiting ancient techniques and lost knowledge to challenge the modern reliance on external systems.

Fatoş Üstek is an independent curator and writer with over two decades of international experience in contemporary art. She is the author of The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model (Lund Humphries, 2024) and serves as curator of Frieze Sculpture (2023–2026) and curator of Cascading Principles Expansions within Geometry, Philosophy and Interference, Mathematical Institute, Oxford University (2022-2025). She is the Co-founder and Director of FRANK Fair Artist Pay, advocating for fair practice in the arts in the UK. Her curatorial expertise spans biennials, exhibitions, festivals, and public art commissions, shaping critical discourse and institutional transformation within the arts.

Üstek’s practice extends beyond exhibition-making, consistently pushing the boundaries of curatorial engagement. She creates synergies for artistic experience in both institutional and non-institutional contexts, expanding the site of encounter to the cityscape and reimagining how audiences engage with contemporary art. Her work blurs the lines between art, architecture, and the public realm, forging new possibilities for cultural dialogue in urban environments.

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an anthropological archaeologist. She received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Rizvi’s own work intentionally interweaves archaeology with cultural criticism, philosophy, critical theory, art, and design. With over two decades of work on decolonizing methodologies, intersectional and feminist strategies, and transdisciplinary approaches, her work has intentionally pushed disciplinary limits, and demanded ethical decolonial praxis at all levels of engagement, from teaching to research.

Rizvi is the Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage (LIAVH.org), an intentionally interdisciplinary, feminist, anticolonial, and antiracist space bringing together archaeological research with data management, visualization, and heritage practice. She is currently working with her team at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Mohenjo-Daro, Pakistan.

Alexander Groves is an artist and co-founder, together with Azusa Murakami, of A.A. Murakami and Studio Swine. Their work explores the intersection of art, science, and nature through ephemeral phenomena such as bubbles, fog, and scent. Described as “Ephemeral Tech,” their practice uses technology to shape fleeting materials and sensory experiences that reveal the poetry of natural processes. Exhibited internationally from MoMA in New York to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, their work invites a piercing awareness of transience and the beauty found within impermanence.

Aruba Khalid is a Dubai based economic researcher focused on exploring the role of technology and innovation in driving growth and strengthening human well being. She has conducted extensive research on emerging technologies and their impact on reforming legacy systems, regional labour market dynamics and the impact of advanced scientific research on social innovations.

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Host or Publisher Alserkal Arts Foundation