With and within the Greenhouse, we experiment practices, try, learn, unlearn, and continue to practice. We plant companion plants, tropical trees, observe them growing together, close some nutrients loops, harvest tomatoes, herbs, papaya, chilies, and we share snacks, meals and recipes. We practice (with) respect, kindness, care, attention, and critical listening. We practice ways to be with one and another, sustainably, fairly, consciously. We practice decolonial and feminist approaches as much as possible. We practice hands-on experiments based on the theories and concepts presented in our teaching activities. We practice diversity, plurality. We take a critical look at our habits and relationships, at our system and its hierarchical and colonial impositions. We practice, daily, together, in comfort and uncomfort. We practice agriculture in its multidimensional and systemic beauty.
arvae
Tara Lasrado, co-founder of arvae, is on a research residency at the SAE Greenhouse sinceMarch 2023.
arvae, dedicated to fostering transdisciplinary collaboration among artists, scientists, and other practitioners, has been deeply embedded in the Greenhouse’s activities. arvae entered a phase of digestion and research in 2023. This phase questioned practices of transdisciplinary exchange and production while sustaining the projects, conversations, and community built over recent years.
The SAE Greenhouse served as an ideal space for these art-science explorations, supporting agroecological transformation. During this extended residency, arvae and the Greenhouse community engaged in a wide array of activities, including weekly collective reading sessions, exhibitions, symposiums, courses, gatherings, and exchanges with students. Together, they shared meals, held meetings, and planned future initiatives. These interactions provided a platform for experimentation, critical reflection, resistance, and togetherness.
Highlights of the residency included publishing our first Zine, presenting our practices in Morocco, hosting diverse courses, and continuing the reading sessions initiated more than a year ago.
Reading Session with arvae
In 2024, we continued hosting reading sessions in the SAE Greenhouse while also extending a few sessions to other inspiring spaces, such as Le18 in Marrakech, Zari3a in Rabat, and Hyperwerk in Basel. These sessions centered on decolonial feminist perspectives in agroecology, with a particular focus on Palestinian agricultural and food systems.
Throughout the year, Kenza Benabderrazik and Tara Lasrado began curating a growing collection of books and resources on the intersection of art x agroecology. This collection, made visible and accessible in the Greenhouse, featured books primarily from our personal libraries. It was a deliberate effort to amplify often unheard and unseen voices and practices within environmental discourse.
This year, the reading sessions became an occasion to collaborate with other spaces and individuals, including Les Complices*, Heiba Lamara, Sarah Mounia, and Balkis Guetta. These gatherings were more than discussions—they were a shared practice of questioning and reflecting, nurturing the community we hold dear. They served as a space for connection, fostering dialogue and curiosity around the transformative possibilities of agroecology and its intersections.
Last year, our sessions focused on Palestinian agricultural and food systems, with curated texts made available online. Two notable events took place with the collaboration of Lescomplices*:
1. Film Screening and Reading Session: The Untold Revolution: Food Sovereignty in Palestine
On April 8th, we screened The Untold Revolution by Ameen Nayfeh, a 2021 documentary exploring the Palestinian agricultural movement’s journey toward food sovereignty. The film highlighted efforts to break dependency on Israeli occupiers and global monopolistic companies, advocating for systems rooted in local resources, cooperation, and culturally appropriate practices.
2. Film Screening, Talk, and Reading Session: Who’s Afraid of Ideology?
On May 6th, we collaborated with Marwa Arsanios and Les Complices* to present Who’s Afraid of Ideology? (Parts I, II, and IV). The films examined themes of ownership, extraction, feminism, and grassroots resistance, particularly through the lens of the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement and land struggles. The event included a talk with Marwa Arsanios, providing insights into her interdisciplinary work on gender, spatial practices, and resistances.
Both events were enriched by reading materials from the arvae x SAE Greenhouse library, emphasizing decolonial feminist perspectives on agroecology.
on monday 21.10 Heiba Lamara initiated our reading session with @sae_greenhouselab making connections between growing and publishing. we collectively read an excerpt from «Adjusted Margin» by Kate Eichhorn on xerography, art and activism; and «Time Stood Still in these Gardens» a zine by Synchar Pde @tungtapandjadoh while collaging with materials from Heiba’s «Sow Together» archive as well as images of seeds, plants and Palestine from the ETH media archive.
on monday 18.11 we invited filmmakers Balkis Guetta Benouachkou and Sarah Mounia Kachiri to initiate our reading session, as a sharing on their research project ALPLAS*, designed to be told in the form of a documentary story.
Sarah and Balkis took us through a compilation of selected texts, film clips and voice notes from their archive on mountain habitats of the sacred, identifying alterity, to the nationalisation of nature and naturalisation of the nation, the use(s) of tourism, to learning from ancestral techniques, reclaiming narratives and storytelling. the sharing revealed their practice of making the unseen/unheard seen/heard, resonating deeply with our ongoing reading practice.
Zine with arvae
After a year long residency of Tara Lasrado and arvae, some texts, impressions and poetry were gathered from our transdisciplinary collaborations with the scientists, artists, curators and more that all contributed in making this year so rich and powerful. A collection of touching contributions that were assembled into a disruptive and strong publication by Mariana Murcia.
With contributions from all the many collaborators of the arvae Research residency program, the ALIMENTO exhibition, and some of the scientists of the SAE group, this collection of texts, poetry, drawing, phots, and personal reflections captures experiences, and impressions on the many events, gatherings, and collective moments in the Greenhouse, unfolding transdisciplinary practices on agroecology.
The Zine was designed by Mariana Murcia and co-edited with arvae is now out and available in the small library collection of the Greenhouse.
“in this in-between space, cared for and carried by the many”,by Lasrado T., Benabderrazik K., Murcia M., Ayala P., Tokars Wernicks C., Dominguez A., Thom B., Galindo Castaneda T., Itty N., Koch M., Essoungou Bony Malong T. , Núñez Rodríguez A, Nydegger P. , Muller C., (2024) edited by Murcia M. & Lasrado T. With arvae and the SAE Greenhouse La
Sowing Seeds with Johanna Lena Dobrusskin
“Sowing Seeds” wa workshop about plants as hole systems of entities working together to create worlds of diversity hosted by Johanna Lena Dobrusskin as part of her internship in the SAE Group and SAE Greenhouse Lab and her current Master Thesis in the Eco-Social Design Master of HSLU.
Johanna invited us to learn to sow seeds and care for plants as a tool to understand these green pluralities we are allied to.
On Sunday 21th of April 2024 we sow seeds, planted plants, discovered and discussed together in the greenhouse.
Collage partage with Carolina Tokas Wernick & arvae
“Collage Partage” was a collaborative open-atelier series that took place on two Mondays: June 12 and 26, 2023, initiated by us along with artist and pedagogue Carolina Tokas Wernick. This series encompassed practices of collaging, reading, writing, eating, questioning, and sharing. We opened up the space to embrace vulnerabilities, imperfections, and pauses. It served as an exercise in transdisciplinary exchange and altering the pace. Throughout the day, many scientists and artists participated, turning it into an open process of transdisciplinary exchange.
Reflecting on this experience, Carolina wrote:
“Holding this workshop in the greenhouse space with Kenza and Tara was beautiful because I think it was possible to synchronize moments and understand that we live in a society and culture that prioritizes performance. We don’t have many spaces where we can just exist, share, care, produce things without pretension, without demands, just produce what comes to mind.”
Oh, and we have a beautiful book of collages collectively created by all participants, which is now part of our shared library.
With the participation of Turry Uma Atieno, Kaleb Adamba, Johanna Jacobi, Rafaela Feola Conz, Navya Itty, Sara Frikech, Anne-Laure Franchette.
Artist in Residence with arvae
Arvae is hosting the research-based photographer Ana Nuñez Rodriguez for a mini-residency in the Greenhouse! In the context of Ana’s trip to Switzerland as part of Food Culture Days, she will join us from May 21-24. Ana’s contribution «cooking potato stories» is part of the Schpensa archive. It is a playful confrontation of different voices and the collision of perspectives. an invitation to immerse in the complex system of meanings and narratives around the potato.
Remapping Zurich with Decolonize Zurich
The project Remapping Zurich offers an alternative guide for Zurich. This digital platform proposes a decolonial memory culture of the city, enabling people to engage with different layers of (neo)colonialism, racism as well as with actions of resistance to various oppressive structures and possible practices of decoloniality. It offers historic context as well as decolonial and anti- racist strategies, that were developed as an alternative response to ongoing colonial and racist remnants in the city of Zurich.
In July 2022 the project and the content of the newly created platform: remappingzurich.ch was presented to a broader audience in the SAE Greenhouse
For the International Network for Urban Research and Action Conference (INURA). Claske Dijkema, Senior Researcher at swisspeace and lecturer at the University of Basel, responsible for a seminar on “Decolonising the Swiss urban landscape” in the MA Critical Urbanisms, invited the participants of the workshop “Getting rid of the M-word?” to the SAE Greenhouse.
Together with Maria Ordonez, we presented the work of the collective Decolonize Zürich and the Remapping Zurichproject (presented in june 2022 in the Greenhouse).
With the participants, we drew a map of an imaginary city and how it is linked to colonialism (who). We introduced the topic of micropolitical aspects of colonialism, shifting the reflection to the level of the body, following feminist theory.
