Magic Resistance. Botanical conflicts and Eco-Feminisms


Opening: Friday July 24, start 7 p.m.
with Performances by Wirya Budaghi & Anguezomo Nze Mba Bikoro

Exhibition: July 25, 2026 – August 30, 2026
Curation: Anguezomo Nze Mba Bikoro, muSa michelle mattiuzzi, Andrea Goetzke

Open by appointment:
Film Screening: August 28th at 9PM with Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman
Reading Sessions: August 27th & 28th at 6.30 PM with the curatorial collective
Finissage (Closing Event): Sunday, August 30, 2026, 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Inspired by the radical philosophies of Gus Speth, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter, this exhibition calls for a profound relational, spiritual and ecological and material transformation, showcasing how communities—historically led by women freedom fighters—re-code cultural memories to resist capitalist extraction and restore planetary solidarity. Grounded in a feminist formulation of social justice, this constellation between Yupanqui Ramos and Milena Bonilla positions ecological care and “plant companionship” as vital modes of territorial defense. Both artists explore how humans and flora together resists colonial control, demonstrating how intersectional care empowers human connection to the soil and activates political resistance.

Yupanqui Ramos’ Error 404: soil not found exposes the dangers of corporate GMOs by contrasting them with indigenous seed sovereignty and the ancestral Milpa polyculture system. Through three performers clad in garments that function as active, soil-filled ecosystems, her work navigates tensions between modern CRISPR patents and ancestral commons-based seed rhythms. Drawing from Mayan narratives, curanderismo traditions and Ubuntu, Ramos anchors her practice in a historical continuum of women-led Mexican land defense, highlighting ecological care as an anticolonial struggle.


By retracing Rosa Luxemburg’s botanical legacy and her own deep personal connection to plants during her political struggle, Milena Bonilla’s video trilogy, I am life, and life is beautiful (A conversation guided by Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium with herbalist and dancer Shelley Elkin), uses Luxemburg’s historic herbarium as a unique meeting point to intersect different cultural traditions of plant companionship, ultimately delivering a powerful eco-feminist critique of colonial capitalism.In collaboration with Shelley Etkin, the work weaves somatic movement with historical archive to reframe prison-era botany as a vital tool for survival and resistance. Introducing “plant companionship” as political defiance, Bonilla connects environmental care to decentralized, female-led ecological farming traditions, positioning flora and ecosystems as active participants in planetary liberation.



Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023) is an experimental essay film by Denise Ferreira da Silva with Arjuna Neuman that focuses on the element of air. The film follows wind currents into Chile’s Atacama Desert to connect the ruins of colonial labor camps and modern lithium mines with the stars seen through advanced space telescopes. By tracking these atmospheric layers, the artists show how modern technology is physically linked to historical violence. Ultimately, the filmmakers employ the wind as a narrative framework to challenge Western paradigms of progress, prompting the audience to recognize the Earth as an active site of resistance that witnesses, archives, feels and responds to the historical violence of colonial exploitation.

Through feminist ecological resistance and body-centered healing, Wirya Budaghi and Anguezomo Nze Mba Bikoro performances for the opening, position the earth as an active participant in human liberation, showcasing how anti-colonial land defense and communal practices, from Kurdish eco-villages to Amazigh-inspired sonic therapy, are essential for overcoming state and patriarchal violence.

The reading sessions take up texts of decolonial and Black emancipatory theory, eco-feminist approaches, environmental justice and historical and current examples of human-plant comradeship in resistance struggles connected to the curatorial frame and research interests for the exhibition. 

The artists’ works will be expanded alongside reading sessions exploring authors such as Denise Ferreira da Silva, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Sylvia Wynter, Silvia Federici, Ros Gray & Sheila Sheikh and Rosa Luxemburg, aiming to re-examine reparations for colonial forensic crimes through the lenses of agricultural exploitation, eco-feminist movements, environmental racism and queer ecologies.

BIOGRAPHIES:

MILENA BONILLA (b. Bogotá)is a visual artist, educator and independent researcher, living and working in Amsterdam. She is interested in practices and knowledge that propose and place particular questions about language and agency as ontological properties exclusive to humans, and how this precept is embedded in the way in which economic policies under capitalism operate. This perspective is informed by research on epistemic diversity and its colonial conditioning, as well as by notions on art as medicine. Recent exhibitions  include the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art BGSW, Slupsk, Poland; CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Framer Framed, Amsterdam, Galeria Municipal do Porto; The School of Impatiences, Normandy; Temporary Gallery, Cologne, and the Museum Miguel Angel Urrutia MAMU, Bogotá, among others. Recent teaching and advisory includes the Oslo Academy of Arts; Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and WdKA Rotterdam. Milena is currently collaborating with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of your Revolution -Amsterdam, in the long term project “Ferals and Ruderals, History from the Cracks”. 
https://milenabonilla.info

YUPANQUI RAMOS (b. León, Guanajuato, Mexico) (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and costume designer whose work bridges installation and performance art. Her practice critically examines colonial dynamics within environmental contexts, intertwining folk storytelling to forge new connections between the human and the morethan-human worlds. Through her immersive installations and evocative performances, Ramos invites audiences to question and reimagine the intricate relationships between culture, nature, and identity. Her work often incorporates traditional craft techniques and contemporary artistic forms, creating a dialogue that transcends temporal and cultural boundaries. Ramos has presented her work at notable venues and events, including 36th Biennale Sao Paolo, Sophiensaele (2025) Humboldt Forum, Berlin (2024), Thalía Theater (2023), Kampnagel, Hamburg, (2022), and Beaux Arts Paris, France (2020).
www.yupanquiramos.com


WIRYA BUDAGHI (b. 1979) is a Kurdish-Iranian performance artist and activist who holds a master’s degree from the University of Art, Berlin. After fleeing persecution from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in both Iran and Iraq, he spent time in German refugee camps before establishing his international art career. His powerful performance art uses his own body to challenge state violence, military attacks, and racial exclusion while fighting for human rights and the right to his mother tongue. Through his highly acclaimed work, which has been featured in galleries and festivals across Iraq, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Germany, he creates a shared space for activists and artists to protest oppression and censorship.
https://wiryabudaghi.com

ANGUEZOMO NZE MBA BIKORO (Gabonese-Amazigh) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, lecturer, somatic body therapist, and human rights worker who combines decolonial embodied practices, ancestral healing, and cognitive behavioral therapy to support queer, BiPOC, and migrant communities toward holistic sovereignty and mental health transformation. Their abolitionist methodology employs para- ec(h)ologies, a creative forensic and sonic tool to investigate geologies, marine minerals, and land displacement to document colonial crimes, agricultural warfare, and the systemic murder of Black women in German refugee camps. Through international site-specific collaborations, their projects merge climate justice, herbalism, and sonic topologies of land and ocean to dismantle prejudices and build grass-root emancipatory tools for civic reparation.
www.anguezomo-bikoro.com

muSa MICHELLE MATTIUZZI (b. Sao Paulo) is an undisciplined artist whose research and practice unfold in works that transit through different means of expression, from performance to writing, from photography to films. Colonial violence is a constant theme of muSa’s poetic investigation and her works appropriate and subvert the exotic place attributed to Black women’s bodies by the white-cis-normative imagery narratives, which transform her image into some sort of aberration, an entity split between the wonderful and the abject. muSa is currently interested in Black Radical Thinking and in the study of the works of philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and cultural theorist Fred Moten. She is the founder of the platform Rethinking the Aesthetics of the Colony in partnership with the Goethe Institut São Paulo and The Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) of the University of British Columbia. She was awarded by the Prize Villa Romana and KHI Max Planck in Florence, Italy (2021). And she was invited as a theater director for the CIA Capulanas de Arte Negra with financial support from the 38th Fomento de Artes Cênicas of the City of São Paulo and the Gwälter Foundation (2023).
www.musamattiuzzi.com

ANDREA GOETZKE (b. Germany) works as a curator and cultural organizer. Her recent programme Plant Stories, with Lina Brion at ZK/U Berlin (2025) examined human relations to plants, why they are political, and how they can be different. Andrea’s practice is committed to creating inspiring spaces for people to connect and build community. Her work of the past years has experimented with the cultural space as rehearsal space for emancipatory practice and ways of dealing with established extractive and oppressive structures and relations. With a part of her work dedicated to music, she currently organizes Knistern, a series for sound and conversation, and organizes the community programme of Music Pool Berlin, after organizing a music festival for many years. Andrea has a background in both digital culture and ecology.
https://linktr.ee/andrea.goetzke

With friendly support by:

An die Arbeit!
Opening: Friday, June 5, 2026, from 7:00 PM;
Concert: Sweet Susie & Manni Montana, 9:00 PM

Exhibition: June 6, 2026 – July 5, 2026
Curated by: Ina Wudtke; film program curated by: Ulrike Jordan

Open by appointment:

Opening:
Friday, June 5, 2026, from 7:00 PM; Concert: Sweet Susie & Manni Montana

Film Screenings:
Saturday, June 20 at 7:00 PM Es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern, Claudia von Alemann, BRD 1972/73, 54 min. OmeU
Friday, July 3, 2026, at 7 PM Ekmek parası – Geld fürs Brot, Serap Berrakkarasu, BRD 1994, 102 min. OmeU

Finissage (Closing Event):
Sunday, July 5, 2026, 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM Time capsule burial

Work is taking place around the clock in a wide variety of locations. But who are the people performing the labor that the machinery of capitalism needs to keep running? The exhibition An die Arbeit! (Work it!) creates a visual dialogue between the works of Vienna-based artist Susi Rogenhofer (aka Sweet Susie) and Lichtenberg-born artist Thomas Bratzke, who—together with cultural scientist Anna-Lena Wenzel—will create a participatory collage of voices and drawings for the show.

Susi Rogenhofer’s audio-visual series United Workers puts workers in the spotlight, making them visible and audible while showing them in all their human complexity. Since 2021, in collaboration with musician Manni Montana, Rogenhofer has been using cameras and audio recorders to explore worlds of production and labor in various countries—such as Austria, Mexico, and Namibia—and now also Berlin Lichtenberg. At the opening on Friday, June 5th, starting at 7:00 PM, Sweet Susie and Manni Montana will give a live presentation of  a 21st-century workers’ music.

While researching the collection of the German Historical Museum, Thomas Bratzke came across a time capsule titled Treasure Chest for the Year 2000. As it turned out, former classmates had produced photos, letters, and drawings as part of a school assignment around 1989 at the 19th POS “Robert Uhrig” (today’s Schule am Tierpark). These items were stored in a chest and buried on the school grounds. Bratzke, who had moved to the West with his family and was therefore not involved in the original time capsule, now wants to repeat this experiment. He is inviting his former classmates, as well as young people currently attending school in Lichtenberg, to collaborate on Treasure Chest of Work – A Time Capsule for the Year 2050. In doing so, he and Anna-Lena Wenzel are exploring the following questions: How has the understanding of “work” changed since the “pioneer assignments” gathered in the original treasure chest? Bratzke and Wenzel will transform the collected and newly created visual and textual material into a wall piece, which will then be buried in a time capsule on the “after the butcher” premises.

An accompanying film program will examine female and migrant labor from a historical perspective.

Susi Rogenhofer (aka Sweet Susie, born 1971 in Vienna) combines art and music in her practice. Using film as a medium, her stagings, performances, and installations—primarily set in public spaces and realized for platforms such as the Wiener Festwochen—negotiate social and ecological questions. In her work, she provides insights into various lived realities, such as those of workers, making them visible and audible to create a public presence for those underrepresented in the existing order. Her previous experience as a club operator at Vienna’s Flex (1995–2007) and as an internationally active DJ and electronic musician continues to influence her artistic practice today.

Manni Montana (Manfred Schmeczka, born 1968 in Vienna)
Electronic musician and social worker Manni Montana began his career in the 1980s as a bassist in post-punk and industrial rock bands, before turning to electronic music in the 1990s. With the duo BASK and later as a solo artist, he released internationally successful records on Dope Noir Records. In 2010, he founded the project CONTACT with Sweet Susie and worked with Franz Hautzinger, amongst others. Today, he devotes himself to new sound experiments in projects such as United Workers.

Thomas Bratzke (aka ZASD, born 1977 in Berlin)
is a sculptor who has worked since the early 2000s with an expanded definition of sculpture that incorporates space, bodies, signs, and social processes. In his films and installations, Bratzke processes autobiographical experiences from his childhood in the GDR.

Anna-Lena Wenzel (born 1980 in Hamburg)
is a writer and artist. She writes mainly about art and for artists, preferably in the form of interviews (including for the ifa-Galerie and the nGbK). In 2022/23, as part of the exhibition Klassenfragen – Kunst und ihre Produktionsbedingungen (Class Issues – Art and its Conditions of Production) at the Berlinische Galerie, she engaged intensively with the working conditions of cultural practitioners. From 2019 to 2025, she was co-director of the project space Kleiner Raum für aktuelles Nichts in Kreuzberg.

With friendly support by:

STOP THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST ART AND NATURE

Opening: 17 April 2026, from 7 pm

From 9:30 pm: music by Martin Ebner

Exhibition: 18 April 2026 – 31 May 2026

Finissage: 31 May 2026, from 3-6 pm

6-8 pm listening session: Frauke Boggasch will play tracks from her collection of Japanese noise music.

Open by appointment: 0178 3298106 or 

Longtime friends Elke Marhöfer and Heidrun Holzfeind explore the transformative potential of social and ecological realities, whether through nonhuman actors such as animals, plants and objects, or through people and the urban and architectural environments they inhabit.

The latest body of work by Elke Marhöfer emerges from an engagement with animistic pottery. Two interconnected series are presented in the exhibition. from 7pm to 4am brings together a range of nocturnal protagonists—figures that inhabit her garden during these hours, occupying a threshold between observation and imagination. witch marks engages with apotropaic symbols historically used to ward off misfortune. These include eye motifs that operate as protective signs while evoking a symbolic and material continuity with vernacular traditions.

Objects may possess a functional use and still exist as contemporary art—a cup or a bowl, for instance. Utility does not preclude their status as art; rather, such objects can be understood as experimental articulations of the virtual, or of aisthesis, in relation to one’s lived environment. These dimensions are not mutually exclusive. Yet Western modernity has historically imposed an ontological divide, maintaining a distinction between fine art and applied art.

Heidrun Holzfeind presents hervideo installation the time is now. (2019) which consists of two films with the Japanese shamanic improvisation duo IRO (Shizuko and Toshio Orimo). For the couple, their musical experimentation goes hand in hand with their activist involvement in the peace and anti-nuclear movement and a free-spirited way of life. They espouse an animist and pantheist worldview and vehemently oppose commercialism in all its forms. Holzfeind interlaces their music and philosophy with the ideas set in stone in Takamasa Yosizaka’s Inter-University Seminar House (1965) in Hachioji, Tokyo. 

The question of how architecture works in everyday life and as a social space has long been a central concern in Heidrun Holzfeind’s works. They examine alternative ways of life outside of capitalist society, strategies of resistance and the potential for social change in everyday life. 

Save the date: Ikebana workshop with Natalie Noti, May 9, 2:30-5 pm
To register, please contact  or insta @flowersandmoods; more detailed info will follow.

http://www.heidrunholzfeind.com     
https://elkemarhoefer.xyz/

The exhibition is organized by: Katarina Šević and Gergely László