PLANT STORIES #1 Exploring the Urban Garden as Refuge. Gardening & Conversations
Workshop with Fetewei Tarekegn // Venue: Dammweg 216, Community Garden in Neukölln
15 JUNE 2025 / 11:00–18:00
Why do urban dwellers yearn for a garden? In the many years that Fetewei Tarekegn has strived to make urban gardens accessible, especially for minorities, what has been ever-present was the expression of need by city dwellers for the garden as a space that replenishes the body and feeds the soul. What is it that makes the garden in particular a space of refuge for the unwanted and “illegal”? While we change and convert abandoned urban spaces into gardens, how do those spaces change us, and what is that change (in both ways)? What is the future of such garden spaces in a gentrifying city and how can we keep them open and alive?
In this summer Sunday workshop, you will learn and practice various gardening skills, like composting, pruning, planting, weeding, working in a greenhouse, and cooking veggies. You can build and share your gardening skills, get to know a neighbourhood garden in a former gardening school, while jointly experiencing and considering what are the qualities that make an urban garden special, especially from marginalized perspectives. How do aspects of class and race intersect with and shape the PLANT STORIES of gardening? And how do we want to organize, maintain and build community gardens? This workshop is both a practical exercise, and a collective experience and exchange on urban gardening. It is open to anyone interested in spending an active Sunday in the garden together.
Free entry. Please register HERE.
Venue: Dammweg 216, Community Garden in Neukölln
FETEWEI TAREKEGN is a curator, urban gardener, creator and host of a radio show focused on the experience of migration and migrants to the western world. Born and raised in Ethiopia, he graduated with a degree in agriculture from a university in Ethiopia in the mid-2000s. He moved to Germany for further studies in sustainable food production at a school near Stuttgart. He has lived in Berlin since 2015, pursuing new ways of creating sustainable urban spaces that can foster gardening & greenery and promote intercultural connections. He consults various projects in this field and produces radio shows and documentaries on this and many other subjects.