Nexus Gardening Project
"We are gathering regularly, to watch things grow. We don’t come from here. We don’t have land. But we are here planting things in it. While we watch things grow, friendships germinate. Ideas are being transmitted. Growing takes up space, place, and time."
Nexus started in the spring of 2021 as an experiment at the Frieda Süd community garden in Berlin Kreuzberg and ran until fall 2022. The idea of starting Nexus was to combine collective cultivation with group conversations on questions of belonging. The aim was to explore possible meanings of the cultivation of land in the urban sphere. Can cultivation help us to belong as new arrivals to the city or if we face structures of exclusion? Can understandings of not-belonging due to a history of inherited violence, dispossession, or displacement be healed by working with soil? In tackling such questions the project set out to perform a two-fold shift away from the following commonly held assumptions;
1. that working with soil and cultivation is a thing of the past: many of us have internalized this idea, often in an attempt to shape our identities and emancipate from places of upbringing, family, and class background.
2. the idea of a “homeland”: in its most depraved interpretations it essentializes belonging to soil and locality for certain groups and works through the exclusion of other groups who do not belong in the same way.
Over time, the two beds at Bauhütte got used more and more as a meeting space (“im Grünen” – in the green) for cultural and political initiatives that work on related questions, largely from decolonial contexts.
To get in contact with the group members, you are still welcome to send an e-mail using this address: nexusberlin [at] mailbox [dot] org
Similar projects
Nexus Gardening Project
"We are gathering regularly, to watch things grow. We don’t come from here. We don’t have land. But we are here planting things in it. While we watch things grow, friendships germinate. Ideas are being transmitted. Growing takes up space, place, and time."
Nexus started in the spring of 2021 as an experiment at the Frieda Süd community garden in Berlin Kreuzberg and ran until fall 2022. The idea of starting Nexus was to combine collective cultivation with group conversations on questions of belonging. The aim was to explore possible meanings of the cultivation of land in the urban sphere. Can cultivation help us to belong as new arrivals to the city or if we face structures of exclusion? Can understandings of not-belonging due to a history of inherited violence, dispossession, or displacement be healed by working with soil? In tackling such questions the project set out to perform a two-fold shift away from the following commonly held assumptions;
1. that working with soil and cultivation is a thing of the past: many of us have internalized this idea, often in an attempt to shape our identities and emancipate from places of upbringing, family, and class background.
2. the idea of a “homeland”: in its most depraved interpretations it essentializes belonging to soil and locality for certain groups and works through the exclusion of other groups who do not belong in the same way.
Over time, the two beds at Bauhütte got used more and more as a meeting space (“im Grünen” – in the green) for cultural and political initiatives that work on related questions, largely from decolonial contexts.
To get in contact with the group members, you are still welcome to send an e-mail using this address: nexusberlin [at] mailbox [dot] org
Similar projects
