Dear all, friends, comrades, colleagues, collaborators and art-enthusiasts,

Soft Gardens has been growing beautifully over its first two weeks, hosting workshops, a neighborhood walk, and a reading group. The feedback has been wonderful, and we’ve been glad to welcome curious guests and visitors to the space every single day!

With this second newsletter, I’d like to give you an overview of the program highlights for the second half of the exhibition run in more detail below.

The exhibition is curated by Bureau of Transitioning Landscapes with works by Kallia Kefala and Kim Bode as well as further contributions by: 

hooops (Lena Astarte Posch & Nicola van Straaten); Lorena Carràs and Jean-Marie Dhur (Zabriskie - Bookshop for Culture and Nature) together with Sina Ribak; Aiko Okamoto; Wanda Dubrau & Juliet Meding; Suza Husse and Aziza Ahmad (Poster).
Accessibility-relaxed format: Agnieszka Habraschka.

Soft Gardens is an exhibition with accompanying program that are developed in a relaxed format and take place in a relaxed atmosphere. You can find more information on what a relaxed format involves and other updated accessibility information, as well as content notes for the first three program highlights, in the attached accessible PDF documents.

Aiko Okamoto, also known as DJ Kohlrabi and Mo Chan, brings her unique artistic approach to radio, creating a space where sound, storytelling and activism meet. In her work, she explores radio as both a medium and a practice – using its sonic possibilities to highlight perspectives that are often unheard or marginalised. Through her work, Aiko combines social consciousness with a deep understanding of music and community. Her DJ sets defy genre boundaries, embracing both the familiar and the unexpected, while her radio projects – such as Notiz für die Welt danach – offer reflections on protest, activism and the world we want to shape.

This workshop is an invitation to experiment with radio as a tool for expression, resistance and connection. Whether amplifying protest voices, uncovering hidden soundscapes, or weaving together diverse narratives, Aiko's approach encourages participants to rethink what radio can be and who it can serve.

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hooops invites you to a collective nap.

Half-sleep, dreaming as a research method. A way to move within an in-between space where we can perceive voices and images that seem more-than-human. Half-sleep is a threshold between wakefulness and dreaming, a transitional zone where our consciousness escapes linear time, and words transform into abstract landscapes we enter. The binary separation of reality and dream is an oversimplification – both are inevitably intertwined.

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huuummming invites you to inhabit the landscapes of Soft Gardens joining the rest of the creatures that dwell there. Together, we will explore how we can share and shape the space, through stories about it or inspired by it.

We will hum, murmur, and softly sing to each other, allowing the space to resonate, perhaps even voice itself. Through short collective writing and vocal exercises, we will create fragments of narrations, expanding the existing landscapes of the installation and deepening our immersion within them.

We will perform our stories for each other, in a bed time story quality – inviting dreams to come and shape new stories yet to be told.

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This talk between the artists and the researcher poet gives insights into themes and methods which inform the exhibition, such as softness as political and artistic strategy, queer ecologies and imagination as a method of worlding. We will drink our favourite teas and visit the beings in the Soft Gardens. In exchange for songs, snacks, poems and gossips they offer what they know about being gardens – in aquatic, amphibian, terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds.

With their cosmogenic feelers, their crawling through different times and spaces, their resilience and mutability they inspire modes of staying soft which might be helpful, even healing in the tectonics of the present.

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