We are located in Berlin, Germany, right next to the former Nazi airport—an airport built in the 1930s, in the middle of the city. Over the decades it became far too small for contemporary aviation. Even the megalomaniac Nazi architects, like Albert Speer, didn’t imagine the scale of infrastructure and globalization that would follow.
Today, the airport building is under contested historical protection and is used largely by the Berlin police—one might wonder, as a kind of continuation of supremacist continuation maybe? What very few people know is that the same building was also Berlin’s first concentration camp, forcing into labour and death especially sex workers and queers. This uncomfortable fact remains strangely unknown.
Right beside this dark history lies the city’s largest park and one of Berlin’s most important ecological regeneration areas. It exists only because of the massive mobilizations and campaigns by „100% THF“ in recent decades, when 300,000 Berliners voted against development plans for the airfield and insisted that it remained a post-infrastructure common.
If you walk just a bit further after a metal gate, following the steps 8 meters below city level, you find our site: a rainwater retention basin, a little enclosed lake by trees, allotment gardens and tubes. It is a part of grey infrastructure network — a man-made system built to manage stormwater and prevent flooding. But over the last eight years, it has become much more than that.
An association of around 40 people have learned to become the stewards and hosts of this post-natural, post-Nazi urban wetland, where grey, green, and blue infrastructures overlap – with us there, the social infrastructure aswell. We have learned from its self-regenerating processes, from the rewilding that keeps happening almost in spite of us, from the contaminations that arrive, from governmental interests, and especially from our own role as humans in a place that, nevertheless, is flourishing with life: amphibians, birds, bees, plants, and so many other beings.
I want to be clear: we are not just researchers of the so called Anthropocene. Our engagement with natureculture practices, comes from daily practice with this site, with building a sense of belonging for this rainwater infrastructures. It comes from the drag of maintenance work, from the drag of political lobbying, the drag of precarious funding conditions, and, yes, the drag of never-ending association meetings.
And still, the site has taught us more than any theoretical text. Supported by artists, educators, and scientists, our understanding of the basin has grown through lived experience. That is why I want to propose the text A Love Letter for Worlds in the Making by Jenni Laiti, a Sámi scholar and artist.
At this point, I want to make a small disclaimer. Many of us – including our association – are white, cis-gendered, and able-bodied. Engaging with Indigenous knowledge and practices as if they were simply available for us to consume requires careful reflection. In this case, the text came to us through our bi-yearly art festival, Climate Care, curated by Rosario Talevi and Gilly Kajewsky in 2023. During those ten days, we invited artists to host a daily hour of collective reading in the basin on texts that inspired them and resonated with the festival’s context.
That year, the basin experienced one of the worst ecological destructions in our recent history. As the City maintenance workers—responsible for what is officially called grey infrastructure—came to remove what they labeled “toxic mud,” to “clean” the basin. In doing so, they destroyed the livelihoods of millions of insects and animals, including our beloved and protected frogs.
“Guided by ancient wisdom and multispecies ethics, our radical collective potential lies in the nourishment of relationships that are reciprocal, accountable, and consensual. To tap into this potential requires us to work with the frictions between worlds, in deep commitment to those closest to the hurt.”
A Love Letter for Worlds in the Making by Jenni Laiti, 2019
This experience confronted us with deep contradictions. It led us to explore ideas of multispecies self-determination and the possibility of legal frameworks that recognize natural bodies as entities with rights. And it was during this time that Jenni Laiti’s beautiful offering reached us—a text that gave us hope, kindness, and a sense of orientation at a difficult moment in our short life in this basin.
“Sharing such knowledge is about reciprocity, learning how to receive and give back. It is an effort filled with a deep recognition of shared responsibility and accountability (Kuokkanen 2004, 6). Instead of imitating Western ideals for which no one is ever enough, we grapple with the immediacy of belonging and place-based solidarity.”
Jenni Laiti, 2019
