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 is infused with toxins, but also the persistence of healing gestures, and the forms of knowledge carried through plants, fungi, stories, and shared practices.

Featured works in How the Soil Remembers bring together sculpture, installation, performance, and collective making to explore soil as a living archive of history, harm, and care.

Thomias Radin’s works draw on everyday life and cultural resistance in Guadeloupe. Through sculpture, playable drums, and enlarged dominoes, Radin reflects on intergenerational knowledge, music as remembrance, and the persistence of colonial power structures beneath familiar surfaces. His works move between critique and continuity, activating objects through sound, touch, and play.

The collaborative theatre project Invisible Gardeners Beneath the Leaves emerges from a workshop led by Zumunchi e.V. and Kweli e.V. with João Albertini and Henrique Entratice. Working with children, parents, and elders, the project uses insects as guides to think about cycles of care, transformation, and time. The resulting costumes and scenographic elements remain as material traces of a collective process that foregrounds children’s knowledge and challenges adult-centered ways of seeing.

Álvaro Urbano’s installation uses banana leaves to hold together conflicting histories of the Caribbean: plantation economies, poisoned soils, and colonial extraction alongside practices survival, and everyday making. The work reflects Urbano’s broader interest in unfinished projects and abandoned promises, where ruin becomes a site for imagining other, more attentive futures.

Mawongany's contribution unfolds as a living process within the exhibition, cultivating mycelium on site in collaboration with Mycelionaires, and developing a new work with Kalma. The project draws on the healing practice of the bain de marée—connecting tidal movement, regeneration, and renewal to fungal growth and collective care.

To better attend to what grows slowly, what is carried forward through hands and bodies, and how soil remembers both damage and the ongoing work of repair, these works invite visitors too look beneath not one but many surfaces.

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. 

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.

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.