Surrounding Soil

• 2 pm: Delcy Morelos (artist) and Catherine Nichols (curator)
  
• 3 pm: Alexandra Toland (Assistant Professor for Arts and Research, Bauhaus-Uni Weimar) and Gerd Wessolek (professor emeritus for soil protection, soil physics and soil hydrology)
  
• 4 pm: Yolanda Kaddu-Mulindwa (director of the municipal galleries Neukölln) and Nisha Merit (curator)
  

Moderated by Agnes Rameder (Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart)

Language: English


Delcy Morelos and Catherine Nichols explore earth as a spiritual and political entity in an artist talk. In Morelos' work, earth is not only made visible, but also becomes a sensory experience, inviting visitors to smell it, touch it, and let themselves be physically embraced by it. The use of organic materials links to the work of Joseph Beuys, with whose works Morelos' installation at Hamburger Bahnhof enters into a direct dialogue. Both positions address environmental destruction caused by colonial and capitalist structures and raise the question of how these can be counteracted through emotional, physical, spiritual and intellectual engagement with the earth and its cycles of decay, growth and renewal.



The soil scientist and painter Gerd Wessolek and the artist and landscape planner Alexandra Toland address various scientific and artistic aspects of soil and earth, which they brought together in their comprehensive anthology Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene (2018). Their interdisciplinary approach has made them pioneers of the so-called Soils Turn in contemporary art.


The talk will focus particularly on Berlin's Teufelsberg with its eventful history. It was built from the rubble of the Second World War as the highest mountain in Berlin, served as a CIA listening station during the Cold War and is now used as a recreational area and exhibition space for graffiti. The accumulated rubble leads to long-term groundwater contamination. The Teufelsberg is visible and accessible and part of a culture of remembrance, but its history lies hidden in the ground.


The third talk will focus on the decolonial and feminist dimensions of soil. Yolanda Kaddu-Mulindwa and Nisha Merit, the curators of the exhibition Soil Conversations, which was shown at the Galerie im Körnerpark in Berlin and at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, will discuss the works on display and explore how earth in Soil Conversations blurred the boundaries between identities, the role soil plays in the aesthetic notion of “home”, and the relationship between earth and the female body.


Free admission, without reservation



(IN ENGLISH)