BERLIN — “As we gather here, Gaza is enduring what human rights organizations and [United Nations] experts have called an ongoing genocide. Over 50,000 people have been killed — children, whole families, generations. And yet, in Germany, the space for public solidarity is narrowing,” said Antonia Alampi, artistic director of the Spore Initiative, at the opening of Unsettled Earth in late April. “Words like ‘Palestine,’ ‘resistance,’ and ‘return’ have become unspeakable.”Speaking to hundreds gathered at the Spore House, an elegant architectural space defined by its mix of glass and warm wood, Alampi posed a question that reverberated beyond the building’s concrete walls: “What role does culture offer in, within, or alongside movements engaged in solidarity work amid struggle — especially when their work is not salaried like ours?” With that, she set the tone for a somber, sparse exhibition that reframes the Palestine paradigm — not as an age-old conflict, or regional issue, or even an unfortunate tragedy, but as a microcosm of countless global struggles over land and liberation by Indigenous peoples.Sliman Mansour, “The Village Awakens” (1987), aqueous print on archival Canson rag paperThe show opens with “The Village Awakens” (1987) by Sliman Mansour, one of Palestine’s most revered painters. An amber-lit vision of agrarian life — harvesting, herding, fishing — the canvas centers a giant woman dressed in traditional thobe from whose midriff a stream of farmers seems to emerge. At once nostalgic and futurist, the painting resists the reduction of Palestinian life to images of war, extreme violence, and dispossession. Instead, it foregrounds a quiet endurance: women picking olives, a community embedded in the land. It reminds me of the countless other ways in which Palestinians sustain cultural memory, against all odds: Families, for instance, sometimes name their daughters after cities they were forced to flee. In some cases, these cities become surnames passed down between generations. Mansour, too, embodies this commitment to remembering. He was born a year before the Nakba (Arabic for “the catastrophe”), the mass displacement and dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. A year after painting “The Village Awakens,” he created a series about four razed Palestinian villages, a mere fraction of the more than 500 destroyed during the Nakba.In recent years, symbols like the Keffiyeh scarf, watermelon, and Palestinian flag have become synonymous with the Palestinian cause; none of these are found in Unsettled Earth. Rather, thistles (as seen in Ahmed Alaqra’s “I Died a Thousand Times”(2024), a 3D-printed chrome-coated sculpture commissioned by Dar Jacir), and olive trees, long a symbol of sumoud (Arabic for the Palestinian concept of steadfastness), embody a rootedness to the soil and the quiet insistence of holding on to one’s ground. Ahmad Alaqra, “I Died a Thousand Times” (2024), 3D-printed sculpture coated with chromeCurated by Joud Al Tamimi and Lama El Khatib, Unsettled Earth includes work by more than 13 artists, including Moayed Abu Ammouna, Jumana Manna, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Ranging from video installation to painting and sculpture, the exhibition employs a growing format, with multiple iterations over its 10-month run. Its curation urges audiences to dig beneath surface-level debates — so often mired in religion, historical grievance, or rhetorical nitpicking — and to consider what lies beneath. Here, land is not just territory or a resource to be extracted; it is the source of life itself. In this light, the Palestinian struggle isn’t isolated — it’s part of a global pattern of extraction. It’s not just about borders, but the resources, histories, and lives that lie beneath them. It’s about capitalism and the plight of Indigenous peoples, who stand to be brushed aside in the name of hyper-gentrification, or even more troubling, outlandish calls to remove them and redevelop desired lands, as was fantastically and unsettlingly floated by President Trump in his vision of a luxurious “Riviera of the Middle East.”Bayan Abu Nahla, “Airdrops” (2024), print of watercolor drawingLaunched in April 2023, Berlin’s Spore Initiative is focused on the overlap of biodiversity, ecology, and contemporary art. But in a European art world often wary of political entanglements — especially in Germany — Spore has distinguished itself by refusing to sidestep contentious subjects like Palestine and the politics of land. In a country still shaped by the weight of its Holocaust legacy, Gaza has become a rhetorical and political third rail; to speak openly of Palestinian suffering is, in many public institutions, to risk censure or cancellation. The exhibition unfolds in sections, each one probing violence against the land and ecological resistance. In stark contrast to Mansour’s fertile landscape, “Airdrops” (2024) by Bayan Abu Nahla presents a harrowing vision of devastation. Rendered in watercolor, the work depicts Gazans running across a beach to the sea in the wake of Israeli scorched-terrain military tactics. The piece alludes to the ongoing weaponization of hunger and deprivation, including a humanitarian airdrop in March 2024 that ironically killed five civilians after parachutes failed to open.Dima Srouji & Jasbir Puar, “Untitled (Onion Masks)” (2023)Adam Broomberg with Rafael Gonzalez, “Anchor in the Landscape” (2022)Elsewhere at Spore, running in parallel with the main exhibition, Aʿmāl Al-‘Arḍ showcases work by artists and collectives rooted in the southern West Bank. Produced through residencies at Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem (run by the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir), the works include arresting black and white photographs by Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez. Towering olive trees in the Occupied Territories appear as totems — survivors in a landscape of attrition. One photograph depicts the Al Badawi tree, estimated by researchers to be between 4,000 and 5,000 years old, and believed to be the oldest living olive tree in the world. Nearby, an archival photograph from 1940 depicts Australian soldiers in British Mandate Gaza wearing gas masks while cutting onions. Hand-blown glass onions, made in Palestine, hang beside the photograph, evoking Palestinians’ usage of onions to avoid irritation to the eyes from Israeli tear gas. A quote on display from British-Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad, whose novel Enter Ghost (2023) was partially developed at Dar Jacir, captures both exhibitions’ ethos. Palestine, she writes, is “like an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath … this place revealed something about the whole world.” Both exhibitions embody Hammad’s metaphor, exposing not just the wires of Palestine, but the global circuitry connecting seemingly disparate struggles. One enters the exhibitions as a viewer, but leaves a witness — recasting Palestine not as a place erased, but as a place that reveals.