As you read this, multiple devastating forest fires are burning somewhere around the globe. Fire is more than a dangerous side-effect of global heating, it is an integral part of ecologies and human history. And contrary to the proverb, fire can be fought with fire.

The extinction of both known and unknown species is a terrible loss. Attuning our collective reading practice to the Goldrausch 2024 exhibition, I only work with lost and found, we turn to the worldmaking of plants. In an ongoing cycle of change the elements of sunlight, air, and water never get lost but are transformed into new forms of life.

We invite you to celebrate the 50th anniversary edition of the Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club! This time on the ground of the Global Field - der Weltacker, in the Botanische Volkspark Blankenfelde-Pankow, in the north-east of Berlin.

Have you been into composting lately? Making soil definitely is a good idea. We also ask what soil is. Soil is home to 90% of the world's fungi, 85% of plants and more than 50% of bacteria - and 59% of life overall, a recent study says. Let’s look closer at soil organisms through the art and science practice of a microbiologist, who brings the tiniest soil world to light.

[...] soil has also become a ‘being’ that is asking to be taken care of, protected and engaged with.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

Up to 90% of living organisms live or spend part of their life cycle in soils. 95% of our food comes from soils. Most soil is degraded. Through our practices, in which ways can we relate to soil in a regenerative way?

[...] her favorite moment in the life of a tree: when it falls down. When it hits the ground and starts decomposing and goes back to the soil. [...]

There is no regeneration without degeneration. It's really necessary that we let things rot.

Giuliana Furci in: Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts, by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, 2023, Valiz, Amsterdam, p. 99.

Our intention is to co-cultivate regenerative practices: collective readings, community supported agriculture, slow publishing, seasonal cooking and so on. Death, decomposition and degeneration are part of our still human-centered activities. “We Need to Talk about Death”, is just the inspiration we needed to start the new year. Rooted in multispecies collaboration, Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez’ book Let’s Become Fungal!, offers a mycelium perspective to decay and collapse. We are looking forward to a transformative reading, learning about dying, resting and metamorphosing, creating a new ritual together. 

Inspired by floating’s hybrid infrastructure, at the start of the reading, Lynn Margulis’ ‘Symbiotic Planet’ transports us to the shores, lagoons and salt flats that the biologist has studied deeply to form her revolutionary theories and symbiotic worldview. Next, the passages by Robin Wall Kimmerer add manifold lenses relating botany with emotional intelligence and spiritual ways of knowing. Finally, the engagement in these worlds, ultimately, is love. Passing on the offering by Florian Carl and Jenni Laiti whose intention is “to nourish braver spaces”, we are looking forward to reading and nurturing correspondences together. 

What kind of education is needed to take care of the climate and to put climate justice into place? Working at the intersection of art and ecology in Berlin, we must acknowledge that western colonial knowledge systems dominate the climate discourse and the education system. Experimenting with the format of public collective readings, Between Us and Nature runs an emergent process of knowledge exchanges outside of the academy.

Most importantly, “theory” isn’t just for academics; it’s for everyone. And so, the story of maple sugar gets told to (some of) our kids almost from birth. “Theory” within this context is generated from the ground up and its power stems from its living resonance within individuals and collectives.

The shared quotes by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, are an invitation to read together from her work “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.”

Look, they are getting out of the pirogue

They went through difficult moments

Look carefully, look carefully

They came here to make the gardens 

They named them Somankidi Coura

That's how they came to make the gardens 

Look, they are getting out of the pirogue

All the village is here and see 

That's how they came from France 

They came only to work in the gardens

Look, they are going up Look at these workers who came from France 1

The Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club invites attendees to read passages together out loud and share experiences and thoughts about the nature they live in. Each session creates a space to learn from and with bacteria, algae, fungi, soil and multinaturalist narratives, looking beyond disciplines from a mostly female* perspective.

Cities are like the mitochondria in our animal cells - they are consumers, fed by autotrophs, the photosynthesis of a distant green landscape.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions 2013

Meeting at sunset of the spring solstice, the reading is an invitation to gather practices of gleaning and to speculate about the possibilities of interliving in more-than-urban environments. We are very excited to hold the next session at Bärenzwinger within the exhibition Promising Premises.

In gathering roots, just plunging in will get you nothing but a hole. 

We have to unlearn hurrying. This is all about slowness. “First we give. Then we take.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

The farmer’s carrots carry the soil to our kitchen. In patchy clumps the earth sticks to the root vegetables. Food aside, roots usually go unnoticed when we humans look at plants. Below the ground, plant roots extend in a similar or even vaster mass than the established stems and leaves above ground.

We dig (again) into Kimmerers writings, to reconnect with the teachings of plants and the wealth of knowledges. Let’s gather and take our time to notice them.

The Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club invites attendees to read passages together out loud and share experiences and thoughts about the nature they live in. Each session creates a space to learn from and with bacteria, algae, fungi, soil and multinaturalist narratives, looking beyond disciplines from a mostly female* perspective.

Cities are like the mitochondria in our animal cells - they are consumers, fed by autotrophs, the photosynthesis of a distant green landscape.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions 2013

Meeting at sunset of the spring solstice, the reading is an invitation to gather practices of gleaning and to speculate about the possibilities of interliving in more-than-urban environments. We are very excited to hold the next session at Bärenzwinger within the exhibition Promising Premises.

When we started reading together in June 2017, we wouldn't have expected such a commitment - from ourselves as hosts or from you as participants. We feel very lucky to have grown together into a Between Us and Nature community. This alone is a beautiful gift. For our fifth anniversary we invite you to bring a text - maybe written by yourself - that you feel is most connected to the Reading Club.

When we started reading together in June 2017, we wouldn't have expected such a commitment - from ourselves as hosts or from you as participants. We feel very lucky to have grown together into a Between Us and Nature community. This alone is a beautiful gift. For our fifth anniversary we invite you to bring a text - maybe written by yourself - that you feel is most connected to the Reading Club.

The traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous harvesters is rich in prescriptions for sustainability. They are found in native science and philosophy, in lifeways and practice but most of all in stories , the ones that are toId to heIp restore balance, to Iocate ourselves once again in the circle. Robin Wall Kimmerer

The days are getting longer in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun is more present again in Berlin. Photoautotrophs are slowly waking up. Small green leaves of wild garlic push out of the ground in parks and forests surrounding the city. We can relate to Robin Wall Kimmerer when she envies plants for their ability to photosynthesize and share her thoughts on giving. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass helps us to pick up the thread of reading together continuing to interweave knowledges.

Diving into Lynn Margulis’ writing, Between Us and Nature pays attention to the concept of Hypersea, including the principle of recycling of matter as a fundamental ecosystem service.

Participants learn about the symbiogenetic interconnections that allow living matter to move from the ocean to the land.

The reading group takes place at the Climate Care festival on the site of the Floating University. It is an invitation to speculate on the possibilities of interliving at the human-made rainwater retention basin, looking at it as a site of animated water.

The history of any organism is often depicted on a family tree. Family trees usually are grown from the ground up: a single trunk branches off into many separate lineages, each branch diverging from common ancestors. But symbiosis shows us that such trees are idealized representations of the past. In reality the tree of life often grows in on itself. Species come together, fuse, and make new beings, who start again. Biologists call the coming together of branches - whether blood vessels, roots, or fungal threads - anastomosis. [...] The tree of life is a twisted, tangled, pulsing entity with roots and branches meeting underground and in midair to form eccentric new fruits and hybrids. Lynn Margulis (1998) Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, Sciencewriters, Basic Books, Amherst, Massachusetts

A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history, and is a helpful reminder that all life forms are in fact processes not things.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, The Bodley Head / Penguin Random House, 2020

Since the beginning of this year, we have been reading Merlin Sheldrakes inspiring book Entangled Life. Both being passionate mushroom hunters, this book shows us so many more and unexpected levels of how our life is interconnected with these often hidden, organisms.

Over the course of the months our copies of the book have themselves become an interconnected organism "connected to each other, not linearly, but in a net-like, entangled fabric" to quote Humboldt.

Join us for a group reading and informal discussion of Pedro Neves Marques writing.

In their 2016 essay Pedro Neves Marques asked “How Many Natures Can Nature Nurture?”1.

Looking at more recent essays of them, we want to explore the multiplicity of futures and natures. 2

Afrofuturism, multinaturalism, science fiction and political agency of sex, alterities against colonial power, oppression, and manipulation are some of the topics that Pedro Neves Marques’ work deals with. They suggest, that while we need to invent new terms no longer tied to old categories, we must also allow common terms to explode and vary. I am talking about the openness and variability of the human, as a concept, and correlatedly of nature. 3

[...] The history of any organism is often depicted on a family tree. Family trees usually are grown from the ground up: a single trunk branches off into many separate lineages, each branch diverging from common ancestors. But symbiosis shows us that such trees are idealized representations of the past. In reality the tree of life often grows in on itself. Species come together, fuse, and make new beings, who start again [...]. [Lynn Margulis]

From Lynn Margulis we have learnt that symbiogenesis is obligatory for evolution (and the origin of life). Her scientific findings propose other ways of viewing our living Earth and the tree of life than those of our traditional human-centered western perspective. With this knowledge, can we better embrace images and stories of the Yanomani culture? To delve deeper into our relations with nature we go back to Margulis’ revolutionary findings for evolutionary biology, continuing with a chapter on the origin of life. Reading together we train our brains in thinking about the intertwinedness of all species.

This ‘anthropo-’ blocks attention to patchy landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans: the very stuff of collaborative survival.. 1

Inspired by Anna Tsing, this session is looking for 'transformative encounters' with and through landscapes. 2 In ‘Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club’ we read together texts related to natural sciences, art, anthropology, postcolonialism, and (post)anthropocene, chosen from a female perspective looking beyond disciplines. This reading session takes place during the MACHT NATUR exhibition.

‘How can bioeconomy facilitate a sustainable future?’ 3 is asking the MACHT NATUR exhibition, inviting you to experience seemingly everyday aspects of our lives such as insects, plants, soil and air and to question them from a biotechnological perspective.

It is becoming even more evident how colonial and capitalist extraction and plantation systems are destroying ecosystems, people and the planet.

To our elders, gold was just shiny flakes on the sand of the forest’s stream beds, like those we call möhere. They collected it to make a sorcery substance intended to blind people with whom they were angry. In the past, this metal dust was highly feared. [...] When the white people tear minerals out of the ground, they grind them up with their machines, then heat them in their factories. During their work a fine dust emanates from these minerals, spreading like an invisible breeze in their cities. It is a dangerous sorcery substance that gets into their eyes and makes their eyesight worse and worse. 3

With so many uncertainties and questions in mind, let’s turn to ecologies for inspirations in our thinking and doing:

Although we have only just begun to understand collective behaviour in a few systems, we already see analogies in the forms of collective behavior used by neurons, other types of cells, and ant colonies. This suggests to me that the number of forms of collective behavior used in different systems is not infinite, and so there is some hope if we look at ecologies associated with the forms of collective behavior, we will see trends. Deborah M. Gordon: Without Planning - The evolution of collective behavior in ant colonies. IN: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet – Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (Eds.), 2017, University of Minnesota Press.

In 2005 the philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “Solastalgia”.

[...] solastalgia is the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. 1

During session #28, reading together in the  ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’ 2 anthology, we started our exchange on ecological loss and grief in general. In the next session we want to deepen this study and conversation, give space to talk and share our feeling of loss. We see this as a practice to discuss tools to learn to deal with these emotions.

In the last session questions arose: How and when did we lose rituals to grieve? And how can we accept our ecological grief while people’s lives are directly threatened by climate change and environmental destruction? How to grasp collective grief? Is there a shift in the feeling of grief?

How not to surrender to grief?

Around one and a half years ago, reading Rebecca Solnit's guide to changing the world, we learned that social and ecological activism can give ‘Hope in the Dark’.

Around five months ago, burning forests in Brazil and Bolivia took us to the Yanomani worldview wondering about their value of growth ‘në rope’.

Today, borderless fires are asphyxiating our hopes.

In the first session of 2020, the Reading Club becomes our ritual to hold and share our feelings of loss. Let’s continue practicing worldviews reading together stories of encounters between humans, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and soils. 1

Finally we have the courage to flip to the ‘Ghosts of the Anthropocene’ side of the ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet‘ anthology, which is asking:

What kinds of human disturbances can life on Earth bear? 2

We must share space with the ghostly contours of a stone, the radioactivity of a fingerprint, the eggs of a horseshoe crab, a wild bat pollinator, an absent wildflower in a meadow, a lichen on a tombstone [...]. It is these shared spaces, or what we call haunted landscapes, that relentlessly trouble the narratives of Progress, and urges us to radically imagine worlds that are possible because they are already here. 3

Trying to imagine an oceanic worldview, we became aware of our senses. Or rather, aware of lost senses no longer practiced such as orientations in the oceans or seeing underwater.

To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water. For to the sea's children nothing is so important as the fluidity of their world. It is water that they breathe; water that brings them food; water through which they see, by filtered sunshine from which first the red rays, then the greens, and finally the purples have been strained; water through which they sense vibrations equivalent to sound. Rachel Carson, Undersea, 1

Why imagining an oceanic worldview? No forests could exist without the dust from the deserts, without the winds and oceans.

Like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent/continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future. Kamau Brathwaite 1

Last month the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate was issued. It finds ocean warming and acidification, loss of oxygen and changes in nutrient supplies. It warns us that marine life is already affected in all areas. What does that mean for human life? Reading together we want to learn about the entanglements of human and non-human, of land and water, of forest and ocean. Healthy oceans are carbon sinks and are producing oxygen, playing a fundamental role in regulating global temperatures. Damaged marine ecosystems are no longer offering food, livelihoods, nor safe coastlines.

For the stone of this land to be bombed

by the wind & all this, all this water

wood

has become so useless, stripped wet,

fragile, broken, totally uninhabitable

with what we must still build

Kamau Brathwaite 2

Forest trees and garden plants do not grow all by themselves, as white people think. Our forest is vast and beautiful. But it is not like this without reason. Its value of growth makes it so. This is what we call në rope. Nothing would grow there without it. It comes and goes like a visitor, making plants grow everywhere on its path. Kopenawa & Albert, 2013

How do forests and plants live and think according to alternate cosmovisions?

Through the ongoing dialogue between Davi Kopenawa, Shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon, and anthropologist Bruce Albert, the collaborative book "The Falling Sky - Words of a Yanomami Shaman" published by Harvard University Press, 2013, came to life.

This is an invitation to gather with an open mind and read together out loud. Collectively we will read passages from the book "The Falling Sky". We will learn from Yanomami culture, their spirits and ideas around the ‘value of growth of the forest’ (urihi a në rope).

Forest trees and garden plants do not grow all by themselves, as white people think. Our forest is vast and beautiful. But it is not like this without reason. Its value of growth makes it so. This is what we call në rope. Nothing would grow there without it. It comes and goes like a visitor, making plants grow everywhere on its path. Kopenawa & Albert, 2013

How do forests and plants live and think according to alternate cosmovisions?

Through the ongoing dialogue between Davi Kopenawa, Shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon, and anthropologist Bruce Albert, the collaborative book "The Falling Sky - Words of a Yanomami Shaman" came to life.

This is an invitation to gather with an open mind and read together out loud. Collectively we will read passages from the book "The Falling Sky". We will learn from Yanomami culture, their spirits and ideas around the ‘value of growth of the forest’ (urihi a në rope).

Over the last 2 years, our monthly gathering at Zabriskie bookshop is organically growing. Within the ‘Dé-jardiner’ exhibition, the ‘Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club’ becomes both a live performance events enfolding while happening and a collective practice of transdisciplinary learning co-shaped by each participant.

The Reading Club explores natural sciences, art activism, anthropology, postcolonialism, (post)anthropocene, from a female perspective. Looking beyond disciplines, at session #23 we learn from great plants that seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. 1

At this session we will read from Londa Schiebinger’s book Plants and Empire, dedicated To the memory of the men and women whose knowledge of fertility control has been lost in the mists of time and to the ravages of history

During birth, cells are exchanged between mother and the newborn, we recently learnt. 1

What does that mean for our identities and relationships? We grasped the idea of co-evolution and symbiosis as a prerequisite for life on earth. We know we have to find new ways of multi species living on our planet dangerously close to tipping points of irreversibly changing living conditions. What does that mean for our relationships as mothers, fathers, or others? What is our vision of a co-living society?

In April we initiated our current Reading Club theme ‚Motherness & Otherness’ starting with ideas of ‘Further Feminisms’ by Rebecca Solnit. This month we invite to explore the concept of ‘cooperative breeding’ - Allomothering - especially in the light of our current unstable times. According to Sara Blaffer Hrdy, allomothers, are individuals of either sex who are not the mother. 2

During birth, cells are exchanged between mother and the newborn, we recently learnt.

What does that mean for our identities and relationships?

We grasped the idea of co-evolution and symbiosis as a prerequisite for life on earth. We know we have to find new ways of multi species living on our planet dangerously close to tipping points of irreversibly changing living conditions. What does that mean for our relationships as mothers, fathers, or others? What is our vision of a co-living society? We’ve read women authors of many fields: biologists, sociologists, anthropologists and other researchers including artists.

Margulis about multidisciplinary research and life:

I was no more constitutionally inclined to focus monomaniacally on the cell nucleus than I was to be a satellite wife in a nuclear family; my attentions were divided. My friend Mary Catherine Bateson describes modern women as ‘peripheral visionaries’. A woman must be almost octopoid in her attentions if she is to survive. 

[...] note that you, yourself, were once a single cell: the fertilized egg, the zygote, that reproduced by division to become an embryo in your mother’s womb. […]

If in nine months a single fertile egg can become a human, albeit a pudgy defenceless, and uncoordinated one, is it not easily conceivable that all life-forms today arose from a single bacterium over 3,000 million years ago? (Lynn Margulis, 1998)

Reading parts of ‘Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution’ by Lynn Margulis at session #19 started to change our way we view our living Earth [2]. To delve deeper into Margulis' revolutionary findings for evolutionary biology, we will continue with a selection of essays by Margulis on sex, symbiosis and stromatolites - and Gaia.

We want to look closer at Lynn Margulis work on symbiosis. Her pioneering work in bacterial origins of cell organelles (Endosymbiosis theory) has been dismissed by the scientific world for many years. Today the importance of her findings for evolutionary biology is regarded as revolutionary – changing the way we view our living Earth.

As a species, we still fear the eccentric in our views of ourselves. Despite or perhaps because of Darwin, as a culture we still don’t really understand the science of evolution. When science and culture conflict, culture always wins. Evolutionary science deserves to be much better understood. Yes, humans have indeed evolved, but not just from apes or even from other mammals. We evolved from a long line of progenitors, ultimately from the first bacteria. 1

In the era of the postmodern synthesis, organisms are not individuals and Mendelian modes of evolution are moved to the margins 1. We read about the age of bacteria, horizontal gene exchange, complex webs of lives.

When we realize that plants and animals are deeply embedded in the microbial world, it changes all aspects of plant and animal biology. 2

As biologist Scott Gilbert tells us, we have never been individuals.” His “we” refers to all life; his “individuals” are autonomous species as well as single organisms. If most of the cells in the human body are microbes, which ‘individual’ are we? 3

Starting 2019, we delve deeper into the ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet‘ anthology put together by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt: These essays posit critical and creative tools for survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene.” entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent ‘arts of living’.4

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent ‘arts of living’. These essays posit critical and creative tools for survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene.

[…] a sizeable slice of Amazonian mythology deals with the causes and consequences of the species-specific embodiment of different agents, all of them conceived to have originally partaken of a generalized unstable condition in which human and non.human features are indiscernibly mixed. All the beings peopling mythology display this ontological entanglement of cross-specific ambiguity, and this is precisely what makes them akin to shamans (and to spirits) Viveiros de Castro, The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits

Within the special ‘Nature Writing’ program of the 18. international literature festival berlin (ilb), in session #15 of our ‘Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club’ we will explore multinaturalist narratives from alternate cosmovisions.

multinaturalism affirms not so much a variety of natures as the naturalness of variation – variation as nature.

The second of two session we dedicate to ‘Soil’ with a selection of texts recommended by Alex Toland, who wrote her PhD on the role of art in the communication and cultural implications of soil conservation issues. In session #14 we will read more poems, papers and delve into the soil.

Technological impact on the pedosphere tends to be long lasting. This is, soil has a memory. If the wake of a boat mars the surface of a river, the effects of the disturbance are transitory. The wake disperses and the river rapidly returns to its original state. But when a plow tills a row of virgin soil, disrupting no larger a volume of material than does the boat cutting through the water, the soil configuration does not quickly, if ever, return to its original state. Soil horizons are overturned or scrambled, and the broken soil, assuming it does not succumb to erosion, retains an enduring memory of its encounter with the steel technology of the plow. The soil records its own history. Without memory, soil would return to its initial state and the passage of the plow would soon be erased, as the ruffled water surface quickly calms and forgets the passage of the boat.

Alexandra Toland is a visual artist and landscape planner based in Berlin. She is a co-editor of “ Field to Palette : Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene” which is published by Taylor & Francis Ltd (Oct 2018).

The Book is curated by Tim Dee “with an understanding that people and place are entangled at all levels”.

31 authors writing about the natural world today, such as Julia Blackburn or Helen MacDonald, explore “new and enduring cultural landscapes, in a celebration of local distinctiveness”.

Through the selected passages, we will follow the idea of entanglement, exploring values of the natural world – including the anthropogenic ruins – and what it means to us.

We would like to invite you for a small and informal gathering. The aim is to meet, connect and discuss a specially selected text that brings together culture and nature. We are happy that the next reading of this sprouting initiative will be held at Zabriskie. The text is selected by artist Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky and is a passage from Thor Hanson’s “The Triumph of Seeds”. The book talks about the strategies plants use to pack their seedlings with the perfect lunch and how seeds “conquered the plant kingdom and shaped human history”. During the reading we will particularly focus on how seeds allow plants to travel through time. We invite you to read a review via this link and here a quote as a teaser:

“Anyone who has blown the fluff from a dandelion is familiar with the idea of seeds dispersing through space. In a very real sense dormancy allows seeds to disperse through time. It gives plants a way to position their seeds in a particular moment, that point in the future when conditions will be just right for germination.”