“Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re‐creates, and outdoes itself.”
Lynn Margulis

Context

Sustainable measures were specifically taken for the exhibition project “Art as Ecological Practice” and the accompanying activities and cooking performances. Much of the food used came from local organic farmers Raphaela Kuhn & Bastian Weber in Springhoe, just three kilometres from M.1. Edible (wild) plants were collected in the surrounding area by Seraina Grupp. The carp for the dinner came from the Knutzen fish farm, and glasses and bottles were collected by Andrea Tittel through the Zero-Waste-Itzehoe association. The exhibition design also made extensive use of recycled materials: many materials came from the institutions's own basement or were organised through the Schrott Bewahre initiative in Hamburg assembled and built by Thies Warnke.

These material decisions also reflect the Assembly's content-related aspirations: this project aims to go beyond the mere representation of nature. It asks how ecology can be lived and practised – in coexistence, in care and responsibility for one another and for our environment. It understands ecology as a caring economy, as responsible management beyond short-term profit, exploitation or competition.

The exhibition's reflections therefore follow a motto of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis:

‘Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, recreates, and outdoes itself.’

Margulis has shown that evolution is not just “survival of the fittest” (i.e., the best possible adaptation for survival), but rather a constant state of contact. Life thus does not arise primarily through competition, but through symbiosis, through constant interrelation. In science, this is now referred to as metaorganisms – complex, living networks in which microbial, plant, animal and human actors collaborate. This evolutionary biological insight is complemented by the term NatureCulture, which refers to the intertwining of nature and culture. The philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway coined the term ‘NatureCulture’ – deliberately without a hyphen to make it clear that nature and culture cannot be thought of as opposites, but are inextricably intertwined. The two spheres are co-evolutionary – they arise, change and influence each other.

To be concrete: When we tend a garden, it is not simply a matter of ‘culture’ in ‘nature’ – rather, something emerges that is neither purely natural nor purely cultural. Plants grow naturally in the garden – but their selection, arrangement and care follow cultural practices, ideals and tastes. In addition, there are unforeseen events in the garden that are beyond human control and trigger a response. Seen in this light, a garden is a network of both – a hybrid, co-evolutionary structure.

This perspective runs through all the projects in the exhibition: Not a closed space, but a living space for contact, for shared experiences, for exchange, for negotiation and also for friction. The artworks do not stand alone in the space, but in relation to people, materials, places and situations. Visitors are not mere spectators, but often also co-creators in conversations, through participation in workshops and joint actions.

All of this is about rethinking our relationships – to soil, water, animals, plants – but also to modes of production, consumption, biodiversity, monoculture and the role of science.

The Summer Assembly 2025 showed once again that art as an ecological practice lies not in representation, but in shared action, in process and in relationship. It was a multifaceted event combining science, art, activism, agriculture and everyday knowledge – and in the process became a living ‘NatureCulture’ entity in its own right.

Day 1: Water, landscape and the practice of walking

The Summer Assembly had a packed programme under the title ‘Walking, Talking, Acting – Queering Landscape & Liquid Ecology’. The first day was devoted to the theme of water – as an ecological, social and artistic element, embedded in a performative hike through the surroundings of Hohenlockstedt.

After an introductory speech that addressed the concepts of Margulis and Haraway, it became clear that the Assembly does not understand landscape as a silent backdrop, but as an active counterpart – as a permeable territory of encounters, negotiations and care. The walk became a method of establishing relationships: with the terrain, with other bodies, with stories and forms of knowledge.

Marta Musso and Riikka Tauriainen invited us to take water samples for the Plankton Studio. On our way to the nearby nature reserve, we learned about the invisible world of plankton and its manifold forms, and discussed the role of plankton as an indicator of water quality and ecological balance, as well as the enormous diversity of plankton, which, when transferred to culture, challenges human gender binarism and offers interesting metaphors for queerness. Our walk thus became a place of exchange between art, science and the public – a first crystallisation point for thinking together about living beings, environments and knowledge systems.

Afterwards, Michael Hiltbrunner presented the principle of mutualism – symbiotic forms of coexistence – on the lawn at the Lohmühle, using his exhibition ‘ Schimelrych bis Chrottehalde ’ at the Rehmann Museum in Laufenburg (Switzerland). His reflection highlighted the challenges faced by artworks that interact directly with sometimes resistant natural processes, not always to the delight of the artists.

Back at M.1, Dea López and Emilio Hernández Martínez led the performative workshop ‘How to Carp?’ – an anthropophagic exercise with the carp as a cultural figure, as a mediator for human-animal relationships. The collective cooking ritual, which took place around the fire pit newly erected by the artists in the garden of M.1, took centre stage. At the end, the carp was wrapped in clay taken from a pond in Itzehoe, cooked on charcoal and literally incorporated into the meal.

The evening began with the opening of the participatory project ‘Der Unsichtbare Garten’ (The Invisible Garden) by Camilla Berner. Her site-specific work focuses on plants that are usually overlooked or removed as ‘weeds.’ In collaboration with local collaborators, bouquets of (wild)flowers were created, documented and exhibited at M.1. These floral constellations represent a way of making the everyday visible and a plea for biodiversity beyond standardised aesthetics. The project exemplifies the Assembly's mission: to make the seemingly invisible visible, to think about the everyday in political terms, and to establish new relationships between humans, plants, and space.

The evening concluded with a performative spatial installation by students from spatial design of the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel under the direction of Frauke Gerstenberg and Leon Bischinger. In their intervention, they addressed the ambivalence of the garden with the help of an elaborate clothesline installation and ‘talking’ items of laundry. The garden thus became a threshold space between privacy and public sphere, between exclusion and exchange.

Day 2: Beyond monoculture – encounters in the field

The second day dealt with the relationships between monoculture and society, cultural standardisation, racist structures and opposing diversity – both in nature and culture.

With the format ‘Beyond Monoculture – Toward a Choir in the Fields’, the collective Field Narratives (Sascia Bailer, Andreas Doepke, hn. lyonga and Lene Markusen) to a walk that became performative, postcolonial field research. The route led through local agricultural landscapes, past private gardens and organic farms – participants were confronted with their own involvement in ‘monocultural’ contexts. At each stop, stories were shared: about biographical connections with and within agriculture, and about colonial-capitalist structures that continue to shape agricultural systems today and can extend into unsavoury connotations of domesticity and care – for example, when they stem from experiences of forced labour during the colonial era. In the garden of Wiebke Habbe, accompanied by a meal prepared by Marle Rudolph, we were introduced to local plants and seasonal ingredients.

This intertwining of food, more-than-human encounter and art was then continued by Seraina Grupp, who collected (wild) plants with the participants on the way to the organic farm for her sensory taste library – a growing archive of experimental, local preservation practices that found its way into the exhibition space during the Summer Assembly.

The last stop on the tour took place at the organic farm of Raphaela Kuhn & Bastian Weber and featured a workshop by students of Christian Huck’s cultural studies at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU). In sometimes confrontational exercises reflecting on nature-culture concepts and stereotypical attributions of binary logics (male-female, wild-cultivated, etc.), the relationship between language, knowledge and cultural appropriation was tangibly negotiated and the close intertwining of nature and culture was playfully revealed – embedded in the agricultural reality of the region.

In the evening, Byungseo Yoo's ‘Canteen Fermentation Social’ opened at M.1. Yoo's artistic practice works with fermentation on several levels. On the one hand, he prepares vegan food using fermented methods, while at the same time establishing networks and passing on his knowledge. For example, workshops on kombucha and tempeh took place prior to the assembly. For the exhibition space, Yoo has set up a social sculpture, a kind of fermentation laboratory with the necessary equipment (dehydrator, fermentation chamber, refrigerator, etc.) and additional displays for networking and collecting collective knowledge. A diagrammatic wall drawing was started and will be continued in the autumn Assembly. Its opening combined participatory performance, collective cooking and eating with informal discussions on ecological resilience and non-extractive knowledge transfer.