On 26 April 2025, artist Daniela Zambrano Almidón held a ceremony here in the garden of M.1, planting Blaue Anneliese, Heiderot and Rote Emmalie, different varieties of Andean potatoes – a practice rooted in the traditions of the Quechua people of Peru. The ritual included offerings to the earth, including flowers and beer, as a sign of gratitude and respect.

The planting was accompanied by a reading by the artist, who linked the colonial history of the potato and the colonial gold rush in Peru – Abya Yala. She addressed the exploitative dynamics of European colonial powers.

The planting gave rise to a moment of cultural negotiation: while the Quechua tradition calls for direct contact with the earth, the potatoes were planted using the no-dig method – without digging, under a layer of hay – due to the gravelly soil.

An unexpected event reinforced the symbolic meaning: one participant lost her grandmother's gold ring in the haystack – a return to the earth as a poetic coincidence.

Huatia Ceremony
27 September 2025

On Saturday, 27 September, the Fall Assembly opened with a walk to the garden of artist Wiebke Habbe. There, Daniela Zambrano Almidón guided participants through the making of a Huatia — a traditional Andean earth-oven used to cook potatoes with heated stones. The stones, collected from a nearby quarry, recalled both the deep time of the Pleistocene and today’s extractive mining activities in Schleswig-Holstein, as pointed out by Habbe.

The collective preparation — cleaning stones and potatoes, lighting the fire, layering leaves and soil — became an act of shared work, care, and reflection. As the oven was sealed, Zambrano Almidón led a ritual of gratitude to the soil and the ancestors, adorning the mound with flowers. This gesture, however, sparked a moment of friction: Habbe resisted the use of industrially grown flowers on her pesticide-free soil, cultivated over many years as a space of ecological integrity.

Through these exchanges, the Huatia emerged as more than a meal — a site of cultural memory, ecological awareness, and communal transformation.