Installation view of Annalee Davis, “A Recuperative Gesture”(2025) in Welto and the Sacred Bush at Spore House, Berlin (all photos Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic) BERLIN — Welto and the Sacred Bush transforms the upstairs gallery of Spore Initiative’s Berlin headquarters into a vibrant and unruly Caribbean garden. Instead of replicating a literal one, however, the show features contemporary art that embodies the cultivating logic of such a space. Visitors can wander amid mixed-media and participatory installations grounded in Indigenous and diasporic cosmologies, ancestral memory, and relational futures. Walking into the first gallery, a short film, “Permactivie” (2025), introduces viewers to the eponymous Martinique-based association’s practices of growing food as a mutual aid process. This youth-centered organization empowers future generations to address environmental uncertainty with permaculture principles — above all, caring for each other and the Earth as a practice of resilience in the face of ecological catastrophe.

The Permactivie garden is among the sources for Annalee Davis’s seed and botanical repository, “A Recuperative Gesture” (2025). Pressed botanical specimens from the northwest coast of Martinique, such as blue pea, West Indian sage, and sea island cotton, form a wall-based herbarium that is delicately beautiful and deeply historical. Tethered to French colonial legacies, Martinican flora has been shaped by plantation economies, including the destruction of indigenous plants to clear space for cash crops like sugarcane.

“Permactivie” (2025), film still

Under colonialism, botany has been used as a tool of empire to assault biodiversity and Afro-Indigenous lifeways. “San Nou,” an eco-installation by Aurélie Derard and Mawongany with Mycelionaires, serves as a gesture of restoration. Jars, petri dishes, and bundles of organic matter sit within a glass cabinet that glows in the gallery corner like a luminous altar. It is a greenhouse-cum-laboratory designed to activate mycelium. Mycelium begins as spores — echoing the institution’s own name — before developing into a network of threads when given the right balance of moisture, oxygen, nutrients, and warmth. This fungus carries philosophical weight as a symbol for decentralized networks, grassroots activism, solidarity, and mutual support. Fungi are also regenerative, capable of breaking down toxins and restoring damaged ecosystems — an ecological parallel to decolonial and climate justice visions. Interpreted idiomatically as “our own” in Martinican Creole, “San Nou” also references the African diasporic tradition of bain démarré, ritual herbal baths that cleanse, protect, and reset. Both mycelium and bain démarré thus become metaphors for purging harm and regenerating life.

Afro-Indigenous cosmologies, ancestral plant knowledge, and participatory aesthetics intertwine at the center of the gallery, where a wall drawing overlooks a chalkboard floor on which visitors can write notes. Isambert Duriveau’s drawing “Fidji Pawol” (2025) depicts the values of Lasotè, a collective farming method that promotes solidarity, audacity, family, humility, and love. Inspired by the Caribbean tradition of cultivating the land as a communal gesture of reverence, visitors are encouraged to write and draw their own reflections on the floor. A wall text asks: “Who are the guardians in your own ecosystem? Who tends, protects, listens, or heals where you live?” Numerous guests contributed affirming messages about the people of Gaza and their fight to steward their homeland, echoing Spore’s other current exhibition, Unsettled Earth, which deals with Palestinian ecologies of resilience.

Installation view of “San Nou” by Aurélie Derard and Mawongany with Mycelionaires

A textile work by Annalee Davis sits on the ground toward the end of the exhibition. Embroidered with plant motifs, “Be Soft” (2023–24) is a woven meditation on tenderness. The exhibition encourages thinking and imagining at the register of “lower frequencies” — poetics and lifeways that are grounded, tranquil, and soothing as an act of quiet resilience in the face of extractive economies that exhaust both land and people. Fittingly, many of the wall texts are low to the ground, encouraging visitors to squat down, as if tending a garden. Doing so is an embodied reminder of the rigor and balance required of such labor.

Emerging from a collaboration between Spore Initiative and Permactivie, and featuring artworks by the aforementioned artists alongside those by Guy Gabon, Florence Lazar, Françoise Dô, and elementary school children in Martinique, Welto and the Sacred Bushfulfills its vision of amplifying the wisdom of plants in service of a liberatory future. The rooted knowledge embedded in these creative and ecological practices calls us to tend to the earth and to one another.

Installation view of Isambert Duriveau, “Fidji Pawol” (2025) in Welto and the Sacred Bush

Welto and the Sacred Bush* continues at Spore House (Hermannstraße 86*, Berlin, Germany) through March 29, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Antonia Alampi and Francesca Schweiger.

Alexandra M. Thomas is an assistant professor of art history at Fordham University. She writes and teaches black and queer feminist art histories of Africa and the African diaspora. More by Alexandra M. Thomas