How the Soil Remembers
Spore Initiative, Berlin
25 January – 3 May 2026

Beneath the Sacred Bush, is the Soil.

Soil—so overlooked, so ignored—is infused with memory, and teems with life. Its rich mixture of minerals, water, air, organic and inorganic matter sustains dense, intertwined worlds, and quietly records history. The soils of the Caribbean don’t just remember the brutality of extraction and exploitation, but also the labor of repair.

Spore’s exhibitions do not close; they compost, they ferment, they move: How the Soil Remembers grows out of Welto and the Sacred Bush, a project rooted in the sophisticated garden ecologies of Martinique and their insistence on communal knowledge, care, and endurance. This new chapter acts as an expanded field of relations shaped by the exhibition’s presence in Berlin, its encounters, its misreadings, its solidarities, its gifts.

The focus shifts from the sacred bush to the ground beneath it: soil as a holder of memory, injury, and imagination. Soil is infused with toxins, but also the persistence of healing gestures, and the forms of knowledge carried through plants, fungi, stories, and shared practices.

Featured works in How the Soil Remembers bring together sculpture, installation, performance, and collective making to explore soil as a living archive of history, harm, and care.

Álvaro Urbano’s installation uses banana leaves to hold together conflicting histories of the Caribbean: plantation economies, poisoned soils, and colonial extraction alongside practices survival, and everyday making. The work reflects Urbano’s broader interest in unfinished projects and abandoned promises, where ruin becomes a site for imagining other, more attentive futures.