PLANTED ARCHIVES

Artistic research project, processual installation, Späth-Arboretum of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2025

Based on the botanical garden’s offer to plant a small part of their grounds, this project is an experimental venture that aims to reflect and display soil as a processual archive. In close collaboration with the scientific team and gardening team of Späth-Arboretum, we will replace the existing soil of our plot with different impure soils from regional areas. With the plants that will grow from this soil, we want to address and physically materialize the ideas and concepts of ›local‹ and ›foreign‹ plants, aspects of temporality and contingency, situatedness, purity, and contamination.

We understand soil as an archive (cf. M. Puig de la Bellacasa) of various human and non-human activities varying from nurturing to contaminating, sowing to extracting, etc. At the same time, our project is an attempt to archive the various soils; this aspect becomes all the more urgent when one considers that the soils originate from places that are planned to be built on or extracted from, such as Grünheide or Hambacher Forst. Once the soil bed has been established, we will observe it using artistic and scientific methods. Which plants will colonize which soil? How long will we be able to observe a difference in the vegetation of the different soils?

A project in collaboration with Maja Avnat and the team of Späth-Arboretum.

Exhibited as part of the exhibition “Vegetal Companions”, 13.05.-28.06.2025, in collaboration with Späth-Arboretum and the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as part of the ＿matter Festival 2025.

Images: Maja Avnat