Growing since 2021 in the former railway tracks in front of Speicher XI, WARTEN/GARTEN intertwines artistic practice, ecology, and history. The ground beneath it still bears the memory of Bremen’s colonial narrative, once home to warehouses of goods arriving from overseas. Today, native and adventive plants grow together in this soil, carrying stories of displacement and resilience.

This website grew from that same ground. Conceived and shaped collectively by students of Integrated Design, Fine Arts and Digital Media within the seminar “To Listen is to Think: A Sound Archive for WARTEN/GARTEN”, developed together with PhD candidate Christian Rosales Fonseca at the University of the Arts Bremen, it became a space to gather and share what we have experienced together. We designed, curated and coded this page as an accessible extension of the garden, a place where sounds, visuals, and thoughts continue to grow.

The WARTEN/GARTEN Sound Archive is created and cared for by us, the students. It carries forward the spirit of earlier artistic projects rooted in the garden, extending its networks of experiencing through listening, visualizing, and feeling. Like the garden itself, it remains in motion, a shared space of learning, collaboration, memory, and care.

This website is possible thanks to the support of the Freundeskreis der HfK Bremen.

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Biocolonialism: “Since the inception of European exploration, conquest and colonization, animals, plants (and humans) were transported from their areas of origin to Europe for imperial interest, knowledge and profit. Botanical resources in particular were shipped to Europe (and redistributed to other colonies) as commercial crops or as raw materials, particularly after the Industrial Revolution.”

Ashcroft, B., Gareth Griffiths, & Tiffin, H. (2000). Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge.

“Imperial taxonomy originated in the destruction and denial of previous systems of classification that it replaced with the incessant impulse to reclassify everything. Everything and everyone must have its precise place in endless lists, indexes, compendiums, and repertoires. Such a place in the archive is meant to supersede people's place in a world previously shared with others.”

Ariella Azoulay. (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso.

“If it is obvious that colonial archives are products of state machines, it is less obvious that they are, in their own right, technologies that bolstered the production of those states themselves."

Stoler, A. L. (2002). Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science, 2(1-2), 87–109. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02435632

“If we examine the process of "understanding" people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.”

Glissant, É. (1997). For Opacity. In Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor Univ. Of Michigan Press.

“When there is nothing to hear, so much starts to sound. Silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening. This is listening as a generative process not of noises external to me, but from inside, from the body, where my subjectivity is at the centre of the sound production, audible to myself.”

Salomé Voegelin. (2013). Listening to noise and silence : towards a philosophy of sound art. Bloomsbury.

“Silence confirms the soundscape as a sonic life-world, and clarifies the notion that sound is a relationship not between things but just a relationship, passing through my ears.”

Salomé Voegelin. (2013). Listening to noise and silence: towards a philosophy of sound art. Bloomsbury.

“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.”

Derrida, J. (1995). Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press.

“Historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power.”

Rolph Trouiliot, M. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon.

“Noise can serve to startle, threaten and annoy; and is often associated with feelings of stress and frustration; however, it may also contribute to feelings of belonging, community and nostalgia.”

Thompson, M. (2017). Beyond unwanted sound : noise, affect and aesthetic moralism. New York ; London ; Oxford ; New Delhi ; Sydney Bloomsbury Academic, An Imprint Of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.

“Indigenous and postcolonial scholarship teaches us that friction-free wilderness, devoid of human intervention, never existed in the first place, nor the division of nature and culture.* Likewise, the position of a neutral recordist, or recording, is no longer a tenable position for contemporary practice and has never been.”

Wright, M.P. (2022). Listening after nature : field recording, ecology, critical practice. Bloomsbury Academic.