Fertile Soils

With Fertile Soil Spore Initiative engages with the history of the grounds on which it came to exist – the Protestant cemetery Jerusalem V, Hermannstraße 86 in Neukölln. A piece of land and soil where different uses, memories, meanings, and relationships intersect: a burial site for relatives, a former camp for forced laborers of the Berlin church communities, a habitat for a variety of animals and plants, a home of collective, migrant community gardens, a local recreational area, a flight path, and more. The project invites exploration of the cemetery, fostering conversations on rituals of death, the relationship to our ancestors, forced labor, ecological cycles, and the mourning of the mass extinction in nature. Fertile Soil is a program of workshops, talks and film screenings, created together with neighbors, gardeners, undertakers, death and grief counselors, historians, artists, and activists, to jointly explore the questions and topics that sprout from this soil. The program unfolds over four weekends from May to
February 2025.