Svitlana Lavrenciuc’s work begins close to the ground.

In northeastern Madagascar, at the edge of a rice field near Masoala National Park, Svitlana once saw a farmer pause mid-walk. He bent down, pressed a handful of soil between his fingers, and spoke quietly about what it held. The soil, he explained, carried the presence of his ancestors. Before planting, one must acknowledge it, ask permission, and show care. “If the soil is neglected,” he said, “relationships —with the land and with ancestors—begin to fracture.”

For Svitlana, the moment lingered. “What moved me was how matter-of-fact it was,” she recalls. “There was no separation between ecology, culture, and responsibility.” Standing there, she felt some of the assumptions shaped by her formal training slowly begin to unravel. Caring for landscapes, she realised, was not only about protecting ecosystems. “It’s about sustaining relationships. And sometimes, the most powerful knowledge is held not in reports or models, but in gestures, stories, and soil held gently in the hand.”

That encounter captures much of what defines Svitlana’s work today: an attentiveness to what is often overlooked, and a commitment to forms of knowledge that rarely find their way into environmental decision-making.

The Soil Values project in Madagascar did not begin with a clearly defined agenda. “It began for me as an encounter,” Svitlana explains. Trained in architecture and spatial design, she arrived with methods and frameworks, but quickly learned that her approach needed to soften. “I very quickly learned to slow down and listen — to people, to gestures, to rituals and to soil itself.” 

In the communities surrounding Masoala National Park, soil was not treated as inert matter. “It carries memory, ancestry, obligation,” she says. It is touched before planting, spoken to before harvest, and cared for as a living relation rather than a resource. The research process followed this logic. Instead of extractive data collection, it unfolded through walking, sitting, observing, and sharing stories.” 

Interviews and conversations with local farmers and community members revealed everyday practices — planting rice, preparing fields, performing small rituals — that expressed respect for land and ancestors. Over time, as trust grew, the research took shape collaboratively. “What emerged was not a single definition of soil value, but a plurality of meanings: care, belonging, responsibility, continuity.” 

For Svitlana, the project reshaped her understanding of what research can be. “I see it as something grown patiently, like soil itself, through presence, reciprocity, and time.” 

Her path to Madagascar — and to this way of working — was anything but linear. 

“My work today sits at the intersection of research, design, and facilitation,” she says. “It emerged quite organically from moving across these roles over time rather than choosing a single, linear path.” Originally trained as an architect and spatial designer, Svitlana learned to think in systems: how decisions made on paper shape daily life, and how design choices influence who benefits, who carries costs, and what happens over time. 

Yet while working in large-scale design practice, she began to feel the limits of architecture alone. “I became increasingly interested in questions that architecture alone could not fully address: whose knowledge shapes decisions about land, nature, and resources? And how do power and representation influence environmental outcomes?” 

These questions drew her into research and transdisciplinary research work. Today, she describes her roles as mutually reinforcing rather than separate. “My research work grounds projects in empirical evidence and theory; my design background helps translate complex ideas into visual, spatial, and narrative forms; and my facilitation role allows me to work directly with diverse actors — Indigenous leaders, policymakers, scientists, and practitioners — to co-create knowledge rather than extract it.” 

In practice, this means that engagement, research, and implementation inform one another. “Insights from community dialogues directly inform how we frame research questions,” she explains, while design tools —such as participatory mapping or storytelling — help make scientific knowledge actionable and relevant for decision-making. It is an approach that mirrors the way the Wyss Academy works across scales and knowledge systems: ensuring research remains both rigorous and grounded in lived realities. 

Svitlana’s hope for the Soil Values project is not to replace scientific understandings of soil, but to broaden what they make room for. “My wished outcome is to make visible what is usually felt, practiced, and cared for, but rarely recognised in environmental decision-making.” 

She aims develop a shared language—and a grounded body of insight—that helps relational understandings of soil hold their place in planning and policy, without being flattened into purely scientific or economic terms.  If taken up in practice, she believes the work can help shift how land-use decisions are made — towards approaches that recognise care, continuity, and local knowledge as central, rather than peripheral. 

That same concern now guides her most recent work in Madre de Dios, Peru, where she is developing a cartographic project titled Assembling the Neglected. The project explores how mapping — long used to define and control territories— can instead support more inclusive decision-making. 

The focus is on enabling Indigenous and local communities to articulate their own values, priorities, and relationships to land. Svitlana’s contribution lies in reshaping both the framing and the method: “moving away from extractive mapping practices toward co-designed cartographic processes that combine Indigenous knowledge, lived experience, and spatial data.” 

The project will involve participatory mapping workflows, operative map prototypes, and close collaboration with local partners. Ethical considerations such as data sovereignty and representation are embedded from the outset, not added later. Within the Wyss Academy, the work feeds into broader efforts around governance, territorial planning, and innovation — offering concrete tools for more inclusive and relational decision-making across forested landscapes.

Across Madagascar and Peru, research and mapping, facilitation and design, a consistent thread runs through Svitlana’s work: an insistence on care. It is care for relationships, knowledge systems, and futures that are shaped not only by models and policies, but by everyday practices and quiet gestures. 

Svitlana investigates the cultural meanings and lived practices of soil across agricultural and forested landscapes, bridging environmental humanities, visual culture, and spatial practice. At the Wyss Academy for Nature, she leads and co-designs transdisciplinary projects that bring together Indigenous knowledge holders, scientists, policymakers, and civil society actors. Through participatory cartography, visual storytelling, and research-based films, she develops tools that support environmental justice and more inclusive governance. 

The essence of her work is perhaps best captured in that moment in Madagascar: a farmer, a handful of soil, and a reminder that the ground beneath our feet is not only something we manage — it is something we live in relationship with. If we learn to listen, Svitlana suggests, soil still has much to teach us.