Throwback Winter Assembly
Ronald Kolb, 19 February 2026
Coordination is elusive. It cannot be grasped in a single impression. Because it works across different intervals and rhythms of time, no single snapshot can capture it.
Elaine Gan and Anna Tsing, "How Things Hold:," Matsutake Worlds, 2021
The Winter Assembly marked the conclusion of the year-long exhibition project Art as Ecological Practice at M.1 of the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt. Under the motto “Scarcity as Delight & Regenerative Future”, the final gathering brought together long-term artistic processes developed in close collaboration with local actors and condensed them into a moment of reflection, reactivation, and reorientation. As in the previous assemblies, ecological practice was understood not as representation but as lived coordination—materially, socially, and temporally. The project returned to questions that guided the year: How can contemporary art contribute to a sustainable way of life? And how can exhibitions become spaces where ecological knowledge is not merely displayed but collectively enacted?
This means: Instead of depicting nature, we wanted to explore ecological relationships through performative actions.
Or, to put it another way: Our aim was to leave behind this symbolic distance of art. So it is not exclusively about representing “nature” aesthetically, but about putting ecological ways of thinking into practice through concrete artistic actions – which is why we focused primarily on group dynamic activities and participatory forms: workshops, performances, cooking together, and informal encounters. The exhibition space thus became a contact zone: a place where local conditions meet global knowledge discourses and where we critically—and self-critically—examine the asymmetrical interrelationships of our living conditions, in which we are all entangled.
An important transition in this process was and is the approach to the concrete situation: to the local environment, to agricultural conditions, to fish farming, forestry, and to our interaction with the landscape and nature here on site. It is therefore less about artistic gestures and more about materiality and production, less about display and more about transformation.
A central focus of this assembly is therefore on material production. Ecological practice in art also means taking the material side of our cultural articulations seriously: What is something made of? How is it produced? What does it consume, what does it leave behind—and what futures does it enable or block?
A Grafted Future
This becomes visible in Camilla Berner's project “A Grafted Future.” Its actual location is not the exhibition space, but the Bückenwald forest: there, in November 2025, a long-term intervention began in collaboration with forester Björn Berling.
Seedlings of silver fir and sycamore maple were planted directly on and in old tree trunks—an experimental intervention that makes forestry tangible as a cross-generational practice of care. The forest itself thus forms the central space of action for the project; this is where the temporal dimensions, dependencies, and open processes unfold.
In the exhibition space, we encounter this work in the form of traces: as a photographic reference to an ongoing event. The poster on display is not an autonomous work and does not replace the events in the forest; it is an image produced for the exhibition – an excerpt from a multi-layered ecological context. It refers to a coordination of soil, fungi, insects, animals, plants—and human decisions—what is often referred to as more-than-human contexts—without being able to represent them completely. At the same time, the poster itself is part of a material chain: printed on recycled paper, whose origin can be traced back to forestry production. The poster is thus an expression of the ecological production logic that the project negotiates in a practical way in the forest.
Translocal Dinner
Culinary practice opens up another approach to ecological coordination. The translocal dinner on Saturday, designed by Seraina Grupp, Byungseo Yoo, and Ruben Rudolph, can be understood as a complex, collaboratively developed process.
Local winter ingredients and translocal cooking practices are used to create a multi-course menu that productively addresses scarcity and opens up new perspectives on food, origin, and sustainability. But the menu itself is only the sensually perceptible condensation of a multi-layered coordination effort. The selection of products, their availability, discussions with local producers, the use of different culinary traditions, joint tasting and rejection—all of this forms the actual structure of the project.
On the plate, this complex coordination manifests itself as a composition of flavors, textures, and temperatures. What is being attempted here is not merely a dish, but a network of relationships that is reflected in taste. Ecological practice is not presented here as an image or a moral assertion, but as a culinary experience: as something that is culturally negotiated and at the same time physically incorporated – and this is based on local and global production methods.
The Winter Assembly not only concluded a series of four seasonal gatherings but also gathered documentation, reactivations, and new site-specific works—among them contributions by Ruby Mariama Laura Andersen Ndoye, Anton Backe, Sarah Folker, Nina Fjordbak Nielsen Cecilie Kappel & Sæunn la Cour Degnbol, and Julia Karla, students of the Malmö Art Academy (Lund University) under the direction of Maj Hasager, developed after their encounters in Hohenlockstedt during the Autumn Assembly. The works are site-specific and influenced by encounters in Hohenlockstedt and local ecological conditions.
The Winter Assembly demonstrated that art as ecological practice unfolds through coordination rather than representation. Forestry interventions, fermentation processes, seasonal cooking, walking, dialogue, and collaborative research all revealed ecology as a lived network of relations across human and more-than-human actors.
Winter—understood as a time of calm and reduction—proved to be a dense moment of reflection and recalibration. The Assembly did not conclude the project with finality; rather, it dispersed its impulses. Seedlings continue to grow in the forest. Fermentation cultures circulate in kitchens. Conversations extend into future collaborations.
Day 1: Opening, Film Screening
The Assembly opened on Friday evening with a welcome address by Dr. Philipp Salamon-Menger (Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Culture of Schleswig-Holstein), greetings from Dr. Ulrike Boskamp and Katja Schroeder, and an introduction and exhibition tour by Dr. Ronald Kolb.
Rather than presenting a static culmination, the exhibition space revealed a layered process. Documentation from earlier assemblies—walks, workshops, cooking rituals, field research—entered into dialogue with newly added works. The exhibition had grown across the year; it now displayed its own evolution.
At 6 pm, the film Cultivating Abundance by Åsa Sonjasdotter was screened. Sonjasdotter’s long-term research into cereal biodiversity and agricultural history presents cultivation as a political and collective practice. The film critically addressed industrial agriculture and the erosion of biodiversity, while foregrounding reappropriation, seed knowledge, and cross-context collaboration between farmers, researchers, and artists. The artist Seraina Grupp – who works closely with Sonjasdotter – presented the current status of the agricultural project.
Day 2: Scarcity as Delight – The Translocal Dinner
Saturday centred on the Translocal Dinner, conceived as a performative and collaborative experiment. The menu was based on local winter products—stored roots, preserved vegetables, fermented elements—combined with techniques drawn from different culinary traditions. Scarcity here did not signify lack, but productive constraint. Limited seasonal resources invited inventive combinations, new textures, and careful coordination. The preparation process itself—discussions with producers, collective tasting, adjustments, and reinterpretations—constituted the core of the project. On the plate, this complex negotiation became sensorially present. Ecological practice was neither abstract nor moralising; it manifested as flavour, temperature, texture, and exchange. The dinner thus operated as a temporary social sculpture—an edible network of relations between soil, climate, cultural memory, and collective experimentation.
Day 3: Reactivation and Shared Closure
Sunday unfolded as a day of reactivation and exchange. A guided tour offered insights into the evolution of the exhibition and its collaborations. Works from previous assemblies were revisited in a guided tour and jointly reflected upon.
Lene Markusen activated her Choreographic Mural, transforming her spatial drawing installation into a temporal participatory event formed by the persons present. The exhibition space once again became a contact zone—less a container of objects than a site of coordinated movement. Later, Byungseo Yoo presented culinary gifts—fermented preparations to take home—extending the Assembly beyond its temporal frame into domestic continuations. Tastings from Seraina Grupp’s evolving Taste Library formed the closing moment: preserved plants and experimental infusions – and a tea ceremony – became vehicles of memory and future imagination alike.
Short descriptions of works on display
Der unsichtbare Garten (Hohenlockstedt) (2025–2026)
Camilla Berner
Der unsichtbare Garten (Hohenlockstedt) (The Invisible Garden (Hohenlockstedt)) is an artistic project that focuses on the often undiscovered beauty of unplanned garden cultures. It invites people to see their own surroundings with new eyes—as places of diversity and transformation. The project was first realized in Denmark in 2001 by the Have-kulturfonden (Foundation for Garden Culture) with gardens in and around Copenhagen. Now it is being continued and further developed in and around Hohenlockstedt.
In collaboration with people from Hohenlockstedt, Bokelrehm, Wacken, Itzehoe, Wilstermarsch, and other places, wildflower bouquets have been created, collected, arranged, and photographed.Each bouquet tells the story of a moment, a place, and the people who made it. A selection of the photographs is on display in the Arthur Boskamp Foundation‘s M.1 project room. The exhibition grows with the project. In addition, a regional seed bag with documented wild plants is being created—as an invitation to sow diversity yourself. The bouquets are snapshots of diversity. They are a poetic expression against homogeneity and monocultures.
Archived safe space I & II (2026)
Nina Fjordbak Nielsen
This site-specific installation of two birdhouses, one inside and one outside the institution, plays with the idea of a future in which birdhouses have become unnecessary. It is a deconstruction of the shelter as a supposedly altruistic symbol, in which birdhouses are preserved merely as monuments.
Sotto’Olio – Sonified Kitchen (2025)
Maya Minder & Dominique Leroy
In a workshop at the Autumn Assembly, artist Maya Minder presented algae as both an ecological resource and a cultural practice, combining cooking, storytelling, and ecological reflection. Together, dishes were invented whose main ingredients were potatoes and various types of algae. In addition, the participatory sound and cooking performance “Sotto’Olio – Sonified Kitchen” took place – a collaboration between Maya Minder and sound artist Dominique Leroy. The sounds of cutting, sizzling, and fermenting were transformed into a live composition. The performance invited participants to prepare “Sotto’Olio” according to a cooking score in which sound and movement became part of the recipe itself.
Colonial potato (his)tories. Interventions in the garden and in the stomach (2025–2026)
Daniela Zambrano Almidón
As part of the Spring Assembly, artist Daniela Zambrano Almidón held a ceremony in the garden of M.1, planting Blaue Anneliese, Heiderot, and Rote Emmalie, various varieties of Andean potatoes—a practice rooted in the traditions of the Quechua people of Peru. The ritual included offerings to the earth, including flowers and beer, as a sign of gratitude and respect. The planting was accompanied by a reading by the artist, who linked the colonial history of the potato with the colonial gold rush in Peru – Abya Yala. She addressed the exploitative dynamics of the European colonial powers. For the autumn assembly, we visited Wiebke Habbe‘s garden. There, Daniela Zambrano Almidón organized a pachamanca with the visitors – a traditional Andean cooking event in an earth oven, in which potatoes are prepared with heated stones. The stones, which come from a nearby quarry, are a reminder of both the long Pleistocene era and today‘s raw material extraction activities in Schleswig-Holstein, as Habbe pointed out. Through this exchange, the Pachamanca became more than just a meal – it became a place of cultural memory, ecological awareness, and communal transformation.
A Grafted Future (2025–)
Camilla Berner
A Grafted Future was activated on November 13, 2025, with the planting of eight young seedlings in the forest of Bücken near Hohenlockstedt. Together with forester Björn Berling, nine silver fir and sycamore maple seedlings were planted directly on and in old tree trunks—an experimental method that could provide protection from deer and small rodents while accelerating growth through the remaining root structures of the former old trees. Each planting site was photographed and marked with GPS coordinates to enable continuous monitoring of the trees‘ development over time. Berling‘s principles of forest management shape this landscape. His approach relies on self-seeding processes, with human intervention focused on creating favorable conditions for young plants: opening up sun-drenched gaps in the canopy and regulating wildlife populations through hunting. Forestry is inherently intergenerational, working with what previous generations have left behind while preparing the forest for future generations.
Berners‘ project makes this long-term, silent collaboration visible. A Grafted Future highlights the complex coordination between soil, plants, animals, fungi, insects, and human care that forms the basis of resilient forest ecosystems. The experiment will be continued in the coming years to see if and how these carefully planted seedlings take root and grow. The poster, which can be taken away, is also part of A Grafted Future.
THE POWER OF THE KOLA – Negotiating the Living (2023–)
Astrid S. Klein
THE POWER OF THE KOLA is a translocal artistic project by Astrid S. Klein in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Albert Gouaffo (University of Dschang, Cameroon). It builds on Klein‘s long-standing research on extractivism, plantation economics, and the colonial interconnections of tropical plants. The starting point is her collaboration with a diasporic cola plant in a botanical collection in Germany. In 2024, cuttings from this plant followed an invitation to Cameroon to relocate to their endemic region of origin. This journey raises questions about restitution and knowledge activation, about the equivalence of different knowledge systems, and about the negotiation of respectful, symmetrical relationships between humans, plants, and all forms of existence. Accompanying this was the audio piece To the Red Soil, which was performed at M.1 on September 26. Three works on textile remained in the exhibition space.
Arts of Upcycling (2023–)
Eco Art Studio: James Jack, Taro Furukata, Meika Mizuno, Myu Hanaoka, Ning Zhou
The collaborative art research project “Arts of Upcycling” (2024–2027), initiated by artists James Jack and Taro Furukata, focuses on reciprocity and the integration of alternative economic cycles into contemporary ecosystems. It asks the question: „How can we decentralize power in favor of informal sharing economies? „ The result is artworks made from recycled materials (e.g., canvas), hand embroidery, and color experiments with natural dyes. Ning Zhou is a guest at M.1 for the Winter Assembly and has brought us—in addition to homemade miso from Sodoshima—quotes from the group, which are distributed throughout the house.
Unremembering (2026–)
Anton Backe
Unremembering s a proposal for a temporary monument that will be shaped by time, weather, and biological life. The sculpture is conceived as a work that will be populated by several animal and plant species and gradually colonized by insects, microorganisms, and moss. The sculpture takes up the dimension of the nearby hunter‘s monument, but dispenses with the representations on the monument. In this way, Unremembering draws attention to material processes, biological time, and the relationship between monumentality and transience. The ongoing ecological transformation does not establish memory as something stable and permanent.
Canteen Fermentation Social (2025–)
Byungseo Yoo
Byungseo Yoo’s Canteen Fermentation Social is a social sculpture that explores long-term social transformations. Yoo transforms the exhibition space into a living fermentation laboratory—equipped with a dehydrator, fermentation chamber, refrigerator, and open displays for sharing and archiving collectively developed knowledge. During the assemblies, he activated various participatory cooking performances. Participants prepared kombucha, kimchi, koji, and udon dough. The performances illustrated how artistic practice can materialize interdependence and care through culinary collaboration. For the Herbs Assembly, Yoo transformed the exhibition hall into a collaborative cooking choreography by using a performative stage for the Go-Go Sourdough Udon Dancing Platform. For this event, we made udon noodles in the traditional way, pounding them with our feet to the sound of loud rhythmic music. Fermentation processes became rhythm, choreography, and dialogue—an embodied metaphor for ecological connections and collective transformation.
For the Winter Assembly, Yoo finalized his diagram drawing.
Plankton Studio (2025)
Marta Musso und Riikka Tauriainen
For the Plankton Studio project, Marta Musso and Riikka Tauriainen invited participants to take a walk and collect water samples in a nearby nature reserve. In doing so, they provided insights into the microbial diversity of plankton and its role as an ecological indicator and metaphor for queer thinking beyond binary orders. The shared journey became a transdisciplinary space of experience between art, science, and the public, in which ecological connections could be sensually experienced and collectively reflected upon.
The installation remaining in the exhibition space documents this process and brings the aesthetic and scientific approaches of the two researchers into a common visual language—as a living interface between field research, illustration, and speculative knowledge production. Video recordings of the water samples, including the plankton found, can be viewed in the cinema room in the exhibition hall.
Not fully false moon (2026)
Ruby Mariama Laura Andersen Ndoye
Ruby Andersen Ndoye‘s illustrations are part of the research material for a children‘s book about a bat‘s life with and in darkness. It moves between childlike fantasy and ecological reality and treats darkness not as a deficiency, but as a lived space—one that is still accessible in childhood, before control, security, and lighting systems completely take over. The works reflect on light pollution and its effects on non-human life relationships.
Geschmacksbibliothek (2025–)
Seraina Grupp
The ongoing installation is intended as a living archive for local plants, surprising flavors, and shared knowledge. The central question is: What flavors are hidden in our immediate surroundings—and how can they be preserved, passed on, and experienced together? The flavor library invites visitors to share, try out, and document recipes and preservation methods. Preserves and pickles are not only preserved, but also exchanged – as an invitation to diverse taste experiences and collective memory. The exchange character of the library emphasizes a practice of giving and sharing, in which local plants receive new attention and become visible as carriers of unusual, experimental flavors. As a space for situational encounters and the production of material and immaterial knowledge, the Taste Library exemplifies the concerns of the exhibition: rethinking ecological relationships—through artistic means, through collective action, and through sensory experience. The Taste Library is being expanded: an exchange shelf is located in the café of M.1.
Means and ends (buying arms at the war museum gift shop) (2026)
Means and ends (pause in search of blueprints and figures) (2026)
Sarah Folker
Sarah Folker‘s installation consists of a video loop (Means and ends (buying arms at the war museum gift shop)) and an abstract tin sculpture (Means and ends (pause in search of blueprints and figures)). The sculpture consists of melted tin soldiers purchased at the museum at the water tower in Hohenlockstedt, while the video documents the moment and circumstances of their acquisition. The soldiers were melted down and recast, but did not find a new figurative form (due to the resistance of the material?).
The work speaks of material transformation and narrative breaks. It connects the specific context and history of Hohenlockstedt with broader questions of production, circulation, and meaning formation, allowing new relationships, temporalities, and forms of causality to emerge from the reshaped tin.
Ökologische Dramaturgie (2025–2026)
Lene Markusen
Lene Markusen‘s growing wall drawing in M.1 is a visual condensation and poetic documentation of the encounters and conversations that take place during the four assemblies, transmitted, translated, and retold by the artist. Spanning two walls in an “internal mural,” a multi-layered visual landscape unfolds in which individual motifs interact, overlap, merge, or open up new contexts through their juxtaposition. The drawing landscape follows the concept of “ecological dramaturgy” that Markusen is currently developing: a participatory narrative form based on connection and relationality—between people, things, thoughts, times, and places. In this open dramaturgy, a network of stories and meanings emerges that is conceived not linearly but planetarily—as a documented fabric of perception, memory, and imagination.
Spread throughout the entire exhibition space:
Omniscient matter (2026)
Julia Karla
500 3D-printed phosphorescent models of a germinating seed made of PLA, scattered throughout the room, absorbing and re-emitting light.
Spread throughout the entire exhibition space:
Activated-by-the-artists (2026)
Cecilie Kappel & Sæunn la Cour Degnbol
The work deals textually with concepts from the Autumn Assembly. On this basis, independent playful appropriations were created, which are installed throughout the building in the form of A4 printouts. The texts function less as explanatory labels than as situated approximations that shift perception, establish references, and linguistically remap the location.
In the library:
AUS GEWÄHLTE WERKE,
DAS GEDICHT,
Hausgemacht (2026)
Sæunn la Cour Degnbol
The intervention titled SELECTED WORKS, THE POEM, Homemade in the library of M.1 takes titles from books there and rearticulates them through poetic combinations.