How The Soil Remembers

The focus shifts from the sacred bush to the ground beneath it: soil as a holder of memory, injury, and imagination. Soil remembers extraction and toxins, the labour of repair, the persistence of healing gestures, and the forms of knowledge carried through plants, fungi, stories, and shared practices.

Within this expanded ecology, works and processes weave together across different contexts. Plant knowledge cultivated by Permactivie travels through Annalee Davis’ mandala and reappears in the papier-mâché guardians built by Sol Undurraga, shaped from drawings by the children of École Clémence Caristan. Experiments in care and regeneration unfold through Mawongany's fungal cultivation with Mycelionaires, now joined by an audio-visual environment developed with Kalma.

Women* from Stadtteilmütter Rollberg, Schillerwerkstatt and Yekmal e.V., accompanied by Georgina Espasa, embroider medicinal plants and personal memories—creating a textile garden, that reflects on how healing practices, scents and flavors travel, adapt, and remain even when the land itself is absent. Through the collaborative theatre developed with Zumunchi e.V. and Kweli e.V. with João Albertini and Henrique Entratice, insect guardians emerge as lenses through which children, parents, and elders imagine how ecological life shifts across seasons and geographies.

Works by Thomias Radin and Álvaro Urbano enter this constellation as further echoes: reflections on histories held in body and land, on the fragility and endurance of landscapes shaped by monoculture, movement, and unfinished worlds.

Rather than illustrating a single theme, these contributions share concerns that run beneath their surfaces—how communities care for damaged soils; how knowledge is passed from hand to hand; how healing is practiced in conditions shaped by constraint; how imagination becomes a tool for living with land rather than above it.