by Johanna Siegler // May 8, 2025
At silent green, the overgrown garden of the former crematorium in Berlin-Wedding becomes the unlikely stage for ‘The Vegetable Parliament’: a living, evolving installation that fuses public sculpture, indigenous agricultural knowledge and speculative political theory. Initiated by artist and curator José Délano and developed in collaboration with the collective Tlayolan, the project unfolds over several months as a slow-growing experiment in more-than-human coexistence. The work takes the Mesoamerican ‘Milpa’ as its structural and conceptual core: a polycultural farming system where corn, beans, squash and other plants grow together in reciprocal support. Planted with seeds sourced from traditional Milpas in Mexico, the garden is imagined as a space of potential governance. Departing from this substructure, the initiators pose a question central to eco-conceptualist artistic practices: what kinds of collective futures might we cultivate if agency were extended across species lines?
The Vegetable Parliament: Seeds // Photo by Edgard Berendsen
Structured in chapters, the project began with a ceremonial seeding in early spring; an act that was both literal and symbolic, rooting the work in ancestral agricultural practices and collective care. It continues through the summer with public workshops, performances, readings and communal meals that unfold according to the rhythm of the garden itself. In ‘Building the Parliament’ (May 9th), a walk-in sculptural structure will be presented, that is part canopy and part commons, designed for gathering and as an embodiment of the principle of mutual support that lies at the heart of Milpa agriculture.
The Vegetable Parliament: The Germinator // Photo by Edgard Berendsen
Throughout June and July, the ‘Growing Sessions,’ curated by Christian Hiller, extend this ethos into a transdisciplinary public program. These sessions, developed in collaboration with the Poesiefestival Berlin, reposition the Milpa as a living stage, where the borders between disciplines, species and worldviews become porous. Visitors are invited to reflect not just on ecology in the abstract, but on their own entanglement with it. The Berlin-based collective Club Real stages their ‘Organism Democracy,’ proposing multi-species governance as both provocation and practice. Meanwhile, Brazilian artist and researcher Marina Guzzo leads embodied workshops that weave together personal memory, discarded materials, landscape and plant life and as such compose ephemeral alliances between bodies and ecologies. In August, the project takes a sonic turn with ‘The Vegetable Opera,’ a choral composition by Nicholas Bussmann and Santiago Elordi, performed by the multilingual Cottbusser Chor. The work will give imagined voices to beans, pumpkins and flying potatoes, meditating on themes of displacement, adaptation and rootlessness. It’s a gesture both humorous and haunting, underscoring the colonial histories embedded in global food systems and the fragility of transplanted ecosystems. The final chapter, ‘The Conquering Banquet’ (September 13th), conceived by food artist Inés Lauber, transforms the garden’s yield into a ceremonial meal, bringing the harvest full circle.
The Vegetable Parliament, José Delano and Monserrat Peniche of collective Tlayolan at the Seeding the Milpa ceremony // Photo by Edgard Berendsen
Rather than offering tidy, didactic solutions, ‘The Vegetable Parliament’ aligns itself with a broader genealogy of situated, relational practices, drawing from indigenous agricultural systems like the Milpa, but also from ecofeminist thought, activist gardening and posthumanist theory. These traditions share an insistence that knowledge is embodied, that ecology is political and that care can be a form of resistance. In this context, play becomes a serious method, a way of rehearsing alternative modes of being in relation. What emerges is an evolving process: of growing, listening and being reshaped by what and who we choose to cultivate alongside.
Exhibition Info
silent green Kulturquartier
‘The Vegetable Parliament’
‘Building the Parliament’: Friday, May 9; 6pm
Program: Mar. 14-Sep. 13, 2025
thevegetableparliament.com
Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin, click here for map
