Gardens of Care
Learning to Grow, Learning to Grieve: Cultivating (Micro)communities
Workshop
13. September 2026
10.00-13.00
10.00-13.00
Save the Date
For free
For Youths and Adults
in English/With whisper translation
Registration for this workshop is closed!
How do we mourn while building futures?
This question guides Michelle Teran's artistic work and research. It emerged from her long-term, practice-based experimentation at a community allotment garden in Rotterdam South, where she explored how acts of cultivation can become tools for collective reflection and care. From this perspective, engaging in culture is inseparable from growing: It means cultivating ideas, customs, and social behaviors alongside bacteria, soil, and plants.
Building on this approach, Michelle Teran will lead a curriculum of four interconnected gatherings at the Regenerative Garden of the Spore Initiative. Each meeting is structured around a practical technique and introduces participants to fermentation and composting methods used in natural farming. Working with locally available ingredients—plants harvested at different stages of their growth cycles, organic matter, rainwater, soil, and indigenous microorganisms—participants will collectively produce soil amendments that enhance microbial activity and support healthy plant growth. At the same time, these shared practices create space to name ecological grief and attend to the emotions that arise through close engagement with damaged and changing environments.
The insights and practices developed through these gatherings will be documented as “soft scores”: flexible sets of instructions or guidelines for collective action. They are part of the Times in Common participatory space.
The series continues on September 13 with the soft score, Cultivating (Micro)communities. This process explores the cultivation of naturally occurring bacteria, fungi, and yeasts from the local environment to grow a microbially rich soil amendment. It also reflects on deep time and the meaning of community with non-human beings.
Joanna Macy's concept of Active Hope reminds us of the expansive story of our planet and our place within it. As part of a larger living web, each of our actions—no matter how ordinary or humble—has the potential to create a ripple effect when carried out with intention.
Over the course of three weeks, we will progress through various stages of collection, preservation, culturing, and multiplication. During these phases, we—as a gathering of humans—will care for a living, growing culture as it grows, amplifies, and transforms into a microbial-rich soil amendment.
In October, the series will conclude with a public gathering and presentation, during which attendees will be invited to spread the soil amendment throughout Spore’s garden to prepare for the following year's growing season.
English will be the primary language of instruction. Community-facilitated translation into German is possible.
This workshop is part of the series Planting Communities – Learning to Grow, Learning to Grieve.
