With Those Who Tend the Soil
2025
Dedicated to the guerrilla and community Garden Neukölln, With Those Who Tend the Soil: Gardening As Human Practice is a research-driven exploration of the garden as a site of refuge, healing, sociopolitical consciousness and more-than-human encounters.
The act of tending the soil is understood both literally, as an ancient agricultural practice, and metaphorically, as a sacred process of love, grief and transcendent transformation. Through the practice of community gardening, this research engages with ideas of relationality, multiplicity and care, drawing on contemporary thinkers, gardeners, and authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Paul B. Preciado, while also weaving in personal experiences of depression, migration, and reconciliation within an ever-changing world in crisis.
The garden appears here as a rhizomatic space with its own temporality, where human and non-human lives are entangled in fragile relations of reciprocity, responsibility and parasitic coexistence. Alongside the written chapters, a body of six poems, an installation of drawings and a recital form a multi-layered exploration into what it means to be human and tend for — and be tended by — earthworms, weeds, a garden and Mother Earth.
Presented at WerkStadt Kulturverein (November 7 — 11, 2025) in collaboration and performance with: Agnes Helming, Johanna Küng, Ksenia Lapina and Yun-Chu Liang.
Created under the guidance of Professor Pauline Doutreluingne and Lerato Shadi, in the framework of the MA Raumstrategien (Spatial Strategies) at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.
The act of tending the soil is understood both literally, as an ancient agricultural practice, and metaphorically, as a sacred process of love, grief and transcendent transformation. Through the practice of community gardening, this research engages with ideas of relationality, multiplicity and care, drawing on contemporary thinkers, gardeners, and authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Paul B. Preciado, while also weaving in personal experiences of depression, migration, and reconciliation within an ever-changing world in crisis.
The garden appears here as a rhizomatic space with its own temporality, where human and non-human lives are entangled in fragile relations of reciprocity, responsibility and parasitic coexistence. Alongside the written chapters, a body of six poems, an installation of drawings and a recital form a multi-layered exploration into what it means to be human and tend for — and be tended by — earthworms, weeds, a garden and Mother Earth.
Presented at WerkStadt Kulturverein (November 7 — 11, 2025) in collaboration and performance with: Agnes Helming, Johanna Küng, Ksenia Lapina and Yun-Chu Liang.
Created under the guidance of Professor Pauline Doutreluingne and Lerato Shadi, in the framework of the MA Raumstrategien (Spatial Strategies) at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.
© Photos by Amaan Hassen (2025)
Introduction:
The title of this work, With Those Who Tend the Soil bears both literal and metaphorical meanings, embodying the actual practice of this research. Literally, tending the soil refers to one of the most ancient practices in human cultivation: digging, loosening or turning over the top layer of soil. It is an act performed with a tool, such as a shovel or a hoe, or with bare hands. This gesture prepares the ground for sowing and planting: breaking up and aerating compacted earth, making space for water and roots to move through, while incorporating organic matter so that new sprouts may grow and thrive.
This, however, is not always a composed act. To tend the soil often implies to disturb what has been settled. Worms, fungi and countless microorganisms might be displaced or exposed in the process. Dormant seeds may be awakened, weeds and other cultivated plants uprooted. This disturbance creates the conditions for something new to grow, but it also carries risks, inviting erosion, loss, or imbalance if done carelessly. Tending the soil, then, is not only a matter of technique, but also of ethical principles: an act that demands attention to cycles and relations within nature.
Metaphorically, the sentence opens onto other terrains. Through the experience of working in a community garden, I have come to understand the tending of the soil as the tending of an inner self, and furthermore, as a participatory practice of (re)connecting and also grieving with the world, unearthing what has been buried and letting go of what has become rigid over time. It can be a slow and gentle release of those layered spaces, internal or external, physical or metaphysical, where pain or numbness has taken deep root. In this sense, tending the soil is a transformative practice: an emotional, political and ethical labor of caring for life in the midst of collapse, loss and uncertainty. It speaks as much of rupture as it does of healing; of preparing the ground for new relationships, new forms of resistance and new possibilities of life to become.
At its core, this work wishes to talk about and honor a place that brought me solace in a moment of need and personal transformation. Through the practice of guerrilla and community gardening, I found my way back into the world while, as Donna Haraway would say, staying with the trouble (2016). In collectively cultivating shared soil, I challenge the damaged and predatory landscapes we find ourselves in, by learning and imagining ways of being and coexisting otherwise.
The with in the title is therefore as meaningful as the action itself. It signals an inner necessity for companionship, solidarity and the refusal to imagine cultivation and growth as a solitary human endeavour. To tend the soil is always to act alongside others who make this work possible — whether human or beyond. Therefore, those who tend the soil refers not only to human farmers or gardeners, but also worms, fungi, plants, and all the often unnoticed collaborators who take part in the cyclic processes of nourishing our existence. It is also a reminder that the garden — literal or metaphorical — is always a co-creation, an ecology shaped by multiple bodies and their intertwined relations, where we learn to remember to be human again.
Poems for the Soil:
in our cryptic encounter,
i’ll surrender to the spell of dreams
and swim the tumultuous currents
of our symbiotic metamorphosis.
without apparent notice,
we’ll crack the shell,
learn to affect each other,
soaking up past life tears.
will you fragment me until i disappear?
or instead, strain me to the point
where i am yet able to return,
shedding, glowing under a new skin?
will you attempt to disguise
and impose, in fear, your truth as mine?
or tenderly hold our opacities,
daring to love what you do not see?
for i am not the absolute but a multiplicity
dressed in layers of transparencies,
a parasite that struggles to belong
nowhere and everywhere, arriving here,
a world that once was, and now fades into another.
— haustorium
aren’t we all desolate?
i wonder
is this not what it means to draw breath
in a world of love– and homesickness?
thick weights hanging,
bared chests,
the raucous, lonesome silence
between us all.
perhaps here, today,
i will not excuse my darkness.
today, i watch the gloomy wildflowers,
and how they pity our garden.
avui miro les flors silvestres, musties,
el blau que ja no és blau,
sinó un color agredolç i assossegat,
assecant-se fins a desaparèixer.
today, i watch the gloomy wildflowers,
the blue that is no longer blue,
but rather a bittersweet, quiet color,
withering until it disappears.
brain zaps
i might have forgotten yesterday’s pill.
my head
weirdly dizzy.
how different from a seed
pink and red-lined capsule;
it does not sprout
under sunshine,
only takes the pain away.
if my voice broke,
please excuse me,
the ground i trod on
trembled and shattered.
estimat dolor,
rumio feble
les hores eternes;
quan et despertaràs
i em duràs de la mà
on es viuen els dies?
dear pain,
i ruminate feeble
everlasting hours;
when will you awaken
and take me by the hand
where days are lived?
una espurna de vida mussita:
vindr. quan gaireb. no recordis,
quan tornis a visitar la terra humida,
la toquis, descalça, sota la meva nit porpra.
amb cada llàgrima germina la llavor
que va sembrar la teva ferida,
i floreix la flor més dolça del meu jardí.
a spark of life whispers:
i will come when you barely remember,
when you return to visit the damp earth,
touch it, barefoot, under my purple night.
with every tear, germinates the seed
that your wound once sowed,
and blooms the dearest flower of my garden.
— estimat dolor (dear pain)
the underdog
you
the uninvited
yet insolently messing
fooling me without shame
what have you come to tell?
of course you must tell
you came here for a reason
in that, i know you cannot lie.
dismissed
when not tormented
yet resilient to stay
and spread untold roots.
our great grandmothers sang
your sacred, secret stories.
in the realm of greed
they’ve been forgotten
your songs were born
from marshy ground
like the spells
the wind carries
falling softly
into your arms
i hear the echoes
still, i do not comprehend
their magic.
blind were the eyes,
shut was the heart
the day you became my enemy;
aren’t we all traveling weeds?
witches knew
long before then,
you came to embrace collapse
and watch all empires fall.
wise and misunderstood,
i used to fear your strength,
tonight
i wish to expand beside you
as if that would be all;
it might truly be.
tonight
flowers whisper
how we found peace,
and i kiss you back
under the dark moon.
— weeds
soon, our garden will be gone
no more tender salutes
nor soft farewells
for our hazelnut tree
no more libations
for the mother of herbs
they must once more
feel betrayed
have i failed
the promised word?
i feel we feel
the rising gloom
the garden knows
the soil’s memories
will be turned
and covered
with aloof grass
as if none of us
would have ever lived
within them
to our faithful protector
i do not know how to say goodbye
the scent of the yellow chaste weed
will remain as the hidden scar
of a laid bare, wishful wound
not even the sunroot
can tell me how to mourn
this imminent loss
and yet, we know
their will to return
will not deprive
our dear untamable
daydreaming beasts
from growing anew.
— farewell
murmurs of lives
were born deep
in the five hearts you carry.
dear eartheaters,
i think i have met you there,
where roots rot and seeds grow.
time dissolves
at the brushing of your muddy skin,
hollowing with appetite
the dripping soil —
as if soft pink skies
had never known our gaze;
as if, again,
i would feel a feeling of my own.
with a soothing salute
you curl into our shared stillness,
and uncover the stones
that seal the ground between us.
yet through these fingers
fall the grains of moist sand
from an almost empty desert —
a desert that once filled the air
with warmth.
dear eartheaters,
I awe at your unveiling;
your perseverance in mourning
that we could not cry alone.
— murmurs
i’ve been rushing
through a visceral dystopia
i’ve been selling time
to the wicked
soulless men’s machine
i can’t tell anymore
perhaps i never could
when it consumed our hearts
and vomited them in caustic bile
carving
til darkness
the deepest valley on Earth
a whole world
endlessly
buried
no grieving
while watching
through the screen
of the manmade machine
their child’s bones
beneath paling flesh
decaying numbness
meaningless abundance
silent dreams of eartheaters
swallowing it all
how absurd to live here
how absurd to be here
mumbling words into the screen
of this manmade machine
after the sunrise drags me back
from a gently obstructed sleep
how absurd it has become
to chase the phantom of success
to wake each day to earn money
to keep going
only to keep going
while feeding the manmade machine
which does not cease to insist
to swallow our souls
and starve our siblings to death
i watch us watch
nearly defeated
days, months, and years
pass through the screen
of this visceral dystopia
that consumes
and turns us into poisonous bile
and yet
nearly defeated
i insist on tending
our garden
sowing words
to keep myself free in dreaming
to remember
what it meant
to be human
again.
— sowing wor(l)ds
