From the archive
29 Aug 2026
Tempelhofer Feld is ringed with community gardens, some tended for decades, and it sits at the centre of fights over soil, development and land sealing. For four days in early July it hosted the Kompost Festival, a gathering of gardeners, compost practitioners, artists, scientists and activists around one question: what can compost teach us? There were garden tours at the Feld Food Forest, demonstrations of community composting, a miso and microscopy workshop led by Ayumi Matsuzaka, and an Aerocene solar balloon.
The festival's two organisers arrived by different doors. Severin Halder came through geography: a childhood interest in plants, a thesis written in the community gardens and favelas of Rio de Janeiro, then years of work with urban agriculture across Europe, Latin America and Africa. In Berlin he co-founded the Allmende-Kontor gardens and spent over a decade inside the city's community-garden movement. He started the Kompost Festival in Münster in 2021, as part of his academic work at StadtLabor, and ran it there for four years.
Julian Chollet came through the microscope. Trained as a molecular biologist, he drifted out of academia, tried growing vegetables and found he knew almost nothing about it. Looking at his own soil and compost samples under a lens became, by his account, an obsession - one that produced mikroBIOMIK, a participatory soil science project, and HUMUS sapiens, a collaboration with the Hackteria network. Their small retreats in 2018 and 2019 generated the guides and workshops that later fed into the festival.
The move from Münster to Berlin was deliberate in its method. Halder and Chollet chose to work with what was already on the ground - the gardens and green-commons networks that have grown up around the Feld - and to connect those local practitioners to an international circle of soil projects, rather than import a ready-made programme. On a site where the fate of the land is contested, compost was never only compost.
Before starting anything new, ask the nearest community garden what they already do with their green waste - the answer will tell you where a shared compost bay should go and who will turn it. The bins can be built from reclaimed timber and wire mesh; the garden supplies the knowledge for free.
Makery · Read the source