Stepping Softly on the Earth is a research-led exhibition presenting the work of 20, mostly non-Western and Indigenous, artists. The exhibition invites you to consider human’s relationship to land and territory from a decolonial and anti-colonial perspective.

The exhibition showcases a range of artistic practices that approach our relationship to land and territory through the understanding of the world as a pluriverse – a world in which many worlds coexist and support each other. In this world, all things and beings are interconnected and human and nature are not separated.Stepping Softly on the Earth includes artworks exploring questions around ancestral cosmovisions, spirituality, inter-species communication, embodied knowledge, oral traditions, autonomy, mapping and legal frameworks.

The title of the exhibition revisits a quote that Indigenous activist, writer and thinker Ailton Krenak brings to life in his 2022 book Ancestral Future. Krenak quotes a speech attributed to Chief Seattle (c.1786–1866) in which he says that his people ‘step softly on the Earth’, for they are connected to it, and invites the colonisers to teach their children to do so.