Event | Finished

Groundwork | A Workshop on Reimagining Soil and Collective Life ❘

Workshop with
Sophia Doyle | Åsa Sonjasdotter

As part of the series Damaged Deliberations, this workshop brings together artist Åsa Sonjasdotter and researcher Sophia Doyle for a collective inquiry into land, agriculture, and their entanglement with political and economic power.

Taking place at studio nagelneu at prinzessinnengarten kollektiv in Berlin Neukölln, the workshop explores soil as both material and metaphor: as a site of extraction and regeneration, of ownership and resistance, and of contested meanings – from industrial agribusiness and colonial food systems to nationalist appropriations of “land and soil.” Together, we will consider how questions of soil open up broader debates about democracy, access, and collective responsibility in times of ecological crisis.

Please register by sending an email to mail@diffrakt.space, as capacity is limited.

 

Sophia Doyle (she/her) is a researcher, writer and organiser with roots in rural Bavaria and Ireland. Her research combines her background in Postcolonial Studies and her practical training in agroecological agriculture to explore the imperial histories, political ecologies and epistemic production of food and farming. She is currently based in Berlin, where she is doing a PhD at Potsdam University, looking at the history of farmer education and the production of the subjectivity of the ‚modern farmer‘. She is a member of the Root and Branch Collective (https://rootbranchcollective.cargo.site), and passionate about building connections across different movement, geographic and disciplinary contexts to work towards food autonomy, land access and the abolition of agro-industry as a key and necessary step in the broader struggle for abolition, decolonisation and self-determination.

Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist, researcher, writer, and social organiser, living on the island of Ven, Sweden. In her practice, Sonjasdotter enquires relationalities of crops; their nurturing generosity, the tensions around power, politics, and narratives they stir, and also, not the least, the ways social organisation mobilise and form coalitions around their cultivation. 
Sonjasdotter’s artistic work is driven by an urge to engage in material-narrative processes for the unmaking of violent relations through food and land. Having grown up between monoculture farm fields in the highly industrialised farm region of South Scandinavia, she has an embodied experience of what such relations does to the people, the habitats, the waters and the soil. Further, it was in this region that a ‘universally applicable’ technique for monoculture plant breeding was invented. This technique provides today the base for legislations imposed on farmers by globally operating seed corporations. The topic is elaborated in the 2022 film Cultivating Abundance, distributed by Filmform, made in dialogue with the seed association Allkorn (Common Grains) and breeder of peasant seeds Hans Larsson. For about two decades, Sonjasdotter has engaged in the restoration of peasant knowledges and food relations.
Image: Excerpt from the collage The Kale Bed is so Called Because there is Always Kale in it” by Åsa Sonjasdotter in collaboration with Mercè Rafols Torres, 2023.
When
Saturday,
23 May 2026,
12 to 3 pm
Where

studio nagelneu
prinzessinnengarten kollektiv
Hermannstraße 103
12051 Berlin

Language/s
  • English
  • German
Registration required

Please register in advance with a short email to mail@diffrakt.space

About

As part of the series Damaged Deliberations, this workshop brings together artist Åsa Sonjasdotter and researcher Sophia Doyle for a collective inquiry into land, agriculture, and their entanglement with political and economic power.

Taking place at studio nagelneu at prinzessinnengarten kollektiv in Berlin Neukölln, the workshop explores soil as both material and metaphor: as a site of extraction and regeneration, of ownership and resistance, and of contested meanings – from industrial agribusiness and colonial food systems to nationalist appropriations of “land and soil.” Together, we will consider how questions of soil open up broader debates about democracy, access, and collective responsibility in times of ecological crisis.

Please register by sending an email to mail@diffrakt.space, as capacity is limited.

 

Sophia Doyle (she/her) is a researcher, writer and organiser with roots in rural Bavaria and Ireland. Her research combines her background in Postcolonial Studies and her practical training in agroecological agriculture to explore the imperial histories, political ecologies and epistemic production of food and farming. She is currently based in Berlin, where she is doing a PhD at Potsdam University, looking at the history of farmer education and the production of the subjectivity of the ‚modern farmer‘. She is a member of the Root and Branch Collective (https://rootbranchcollective.cargo.site), and passionate about building connections across different movement, geographic and disciplinary contexts to work towards food autonomy, land access and the abolition of agro-industry as a key and necessary step in the broader struggle for abolition, decolonisation and self-determination.

Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist, researcher, writer, and social organiser, living on the island of Ven, Sweden. In her practice, Sonjasdotter enquires relationalities of crops; their nurturing generosity, the tensions around power, politics, and narratives they stir, and also, not the least, the ways social organisation mobilise and form coalitions around their cultivation. 
Sonjasdotter’s artistic work is driven by an urge to engage in material-narrative processes for the unmaking of violent relations through food and land. Having grown up between monoculture farm fields in the highly industrialised farm region of South Scandinavia, she has an embodied experience of what such relations does to the people, the habitats, the waters and the soil. Further, it was in this region that a ‘universally applicable’ technique for monoculture plant breeding was invented. This technique provides today the base for legislations imposed on farmers by globally operating seed corporations. The topic is elaborated in the 2022 film Cultivating Abundance, distributed by Filmform, made in dialogue with the seed association Allkorn (Common Grains) and breeder of peasant seeds Hans Larsson. For about two decades, Sonjasdotter has engaged in the restoration of peasant knowledges and food relations.
Image: Excerpt from the collage The Kale Bed is so Called Because there is Always Kale in it” by Åsa Sonjasdotter in collaboration with Mercè Rafols Torres, 2023.

Events

See all