📍 Spore House, Berlin
📅 September 26, 2025 – March 29, 2026
👩🎨 Curators: Antonia Alampi & Francesca Schweiger
In the heart of Berlin, Spore Initiative’s “Welto and the Sacred Bush” invites visitors to wander through the imaginary of a Caribbean garden. Rather than replicating a physical garden, the exhibition explores Indigenous and diasporic cosmologies, ancestral plant wisdom, and participatory aesthetics, presenting practices of solidarity and healing.
At the entrance, visitors are greeted by the short film Permactivie (2025), centered on the Martinique-based Permactivie collective. This youth-focused organization frames permaculture as a process of mutual solidarity, presenting food cultivation not just as an agricultural act but as a practice of coexistence and resilience in the face of ecological crisis.
Memory and Resistance Through Plants
Artist Annalee Davis’ A Recuperative Gesture (2025) displays plant specimens collected from Martinique’s northwest coast in a herbarium format. This botanical archive, featuring flora from blue peas to sea island cotton, reveals the scars of colonial history and the devastation caused by plantation economies like sugarcane.
Aurélie Derard and Mawongany’s San Nou, part of their Mycelionaires project, creates a glowing laboratory-sanctuary. Jars, petri dishes, and organic materials housed in a glass cabinet provide space for mycelium to thrive. Here, fungi are not just ecological entities but metaphors for solidarity, networking, and rebirth.
Collective Memory and Participation
At the gallery’s core, Isambert Duriveau’s Fidji Pawol (2025) drawing celebrates the Caribbean agricultural tradition of Lasotè, embodying values of courage, family, humility, and love. Visitors are invited to write their thoughts on a chalkboard floor, with the question “Who are the protectors in your ecosystem?” transforming the space into a dialogue hub.
Toward the end, Annalee Davis’ Be Soft (2023–24) confronts visitors with textiles embroidered with plant motifs, reminding us that softness and fragility can be quiet forms of resistance. The low-placed texts force visitors to bend or crouch, mirroring the care taken in tending a garden.
A Garden from the Caribbean to Berlin
A collaboration between Spore Initiative and Permactivie, the exhibition brings together works by Annalee Davis, Aurélie Derard, Mawongany, Guy Gabon, Florence Lazar, Françoise Dô, Isambert Duriveau, and Martinican children.
“Welto and the Sacred Bush” reminds us that in an age of ecological destruction, plants carry wisdom that can guide us toward a liberating future.
