Welto & the Sacred Bush: in conversation

On Friday 6 June from 18:00, Refuge Worldwide partners with Spore Initiative—a Berlin-based cultural institution focusing on ecosocial justice, education, and exchange—for the opening night of the year-long exhibition 'Welto & the Sacred Bush: Learning from Caribbean Gardens'. 

This group exhibition is presented by Permactivie, a Martinique-based ecological educational association that aims to share permaculture practices through the transmission of practical knowledge and the arts. Taking a hands-on approach to education, Permactivie works on the historically colonised plantations of Fonds Saint-Denis to cultivate reconnection with ancestral plant knowledge through Caribbean Gardens, also sometimes referred to as the word “Bush”. 

On opening night, artists Mawongany (Marcel) — Béle musician and founder of Permactive — visual artist Annalee Davis, and multi-disciplinary artist Isambert Duriveau, will present a guided tour with insights into the showcased works and the philosophy behind Permactivie. To round off the evening, Refuge resident DJs Ka Dansé and Jefe Marrón will showcase their love for the sounds of the Caribbean.

In conversation with artists Marcel, Annalee, and artistic director Antonia Alampi, we take a deep dive into the Sacred Bush: small, hidden plots that carried ecological knowledge from ancestral plant wisdom through times of slavery on the sugar and banana plantations of the Caribbean. Marcel shares his inspirations behind Permactivie, revealing how knowledge and practices from the Sacred Bush are essential not only for the survival of the planet but also for dismantling the colonialisation of knowledge that lies at the heart of creating sustainable futures. 

What inspired Welto and the Sacred Bush?

Marcel: In Martinique’s colonial history, what people say or see about us isn’t what’s actually happening. The colonial gaze puts you where they want, but is not interested in who you are. And it's part of a strategy we developed to show the coloniser something while doing our own thing. Using the master’s tools, not to become the master, but to find a space to be at peace, maybe even to be free.

The word Welto, I know it because it was also the name of my father’s first music album, in a literal sense, means “you see, you don't see.” What you see is not what's going on. As an artist, I’ve played a lot for the Western audience. How do I ensure I’m not exoticised, not just an answer to their gaze? There are two sides: what you do, and what you stop yourself from doing. Even if they exoticise the sight of a Black man playing the traditional drum of Martinique, which I do — should I stop? That’s the other side of the white gaze. So the question is: What do we want to show? What can we show without showing everything? What do we give access to? That’s the Welto part.

“Sacred Bush” speaks to the soil. For Black people who were taken from one land to another, made to work without connection, only exploitation — raped, killed — it doesn’t make sense. And years later, the same land gets poisoned again with the pesticide Chlordane. It's a sensitive topic. The fight against it began in the 1700s and continues to this day. They no longer use it, but the damage remains. It stays in the soil for 700 years. I’ve tested my blood, and I have it too, even though I’m careful about what I eat. Martinique and Guadeloupe have the highest rates of prostate and breast cancer because of. It affects growth in children. Some girls get their periods at six. It affects our relationship to the land; we’re pushed away from it.

With Permactivie, our work is to reconnect people to the land, in many ways, using various tools. We must deconstruct the notion that soil is solely for extraction. They used it for bananas, not for local consumption, but to ship to France. Why? Because of a rule that goes back to slavery, called colonial exclusivity. Everything consumed in the colony must come from the metropolis. France is our metropolis. 90% of what we consume comes from there.

Our bananas are shipped to France, not because they need bananas. It's so containers going back aren't empty. It's an economic balance. But it stops us from feeding ourselves. So we need to change the values we place on the soil. Not just see it as poisoned or as a reminder of slavery, but as where we’re from and where we’ll return.

How can we use the concept of Welto as a framework to reconnect with the land and ourselves?

Marcel: We weren’t just objects placed somewhere; the plantation is not just a banana farm. Our land is sacred bush. In Creole we say “rasier”. In those gardens, you find three essential things: food crops, medicinal plants, and spiritual protection plants. Every garden has something protective, no matter the culture. It’s different from plantations as it’s not rows of the same crop. It’s bush. You look and think, “Nothing’s there.” But when you enter, everything is there; welto.

Harvesting Job, flamboyang and lang vyé fanm seeds for the music workshop, Fonds Saint-Denis

What are we still doing, even if we’re oppressed? Even if we deeply believe in Western religion, we still put something in the garden. That means something. The colonial project never fully succeeded. Nature follows blueprints. Mycelium stays underground for years. Then, when conditions are right, it rises to spread spores. That’s what we’ve done and still do. Like Welto: beneath the first layer, there’s a deep, ancient culture, a mycelium. That’s the forest.

A few years ago, I started a spiritual path. In Voodoo, there’s the sacred forest. What I see in the bush is that. If you were a tiny human in it, it would feel like a forest.

Maybe our ancestors used that little space of freedom to recreate their worldview.

Why do you focus on education? Can you say more about the Grand Mawan project?

Marcel: We work with kids to, like our ancestors, pass down a worldview. Even if we don’t have everything, we plant a seed that may someday germinate. Even if it’s not total liberation, the seed planted goes beyond the physical. It’s a space of freedom carved out in the minds of those kids, free from narratives of the coloniser. The dream is to provide them with the tools to create their own ancestral practices. It's not dogmatic: you should do this, not that. I won’t be there forever to say “no, that’s no good.” They're going to do it by themselves, and this is precisely what’s ancestral. If it survived the time of slavery, I don't know what it couldn't survive.

Colonialism might take things from the land, but not the ancestral wisdom that it holds.

We also use art because it’s a way for the kids to imagine. I come from Bel Air or La Sauté. Whatever we do, it’s all connected. There is no word in Creole to say art. We don't say that. We can say art as a French word, but not as a Creole word. It's not that it doesn’t exist, it’s just that there is no word for it: by contrast, it’s everywhere. In the Western world, it's an independent category: this is art, this is spirit, this is garden. It's embedded in other practices. Just like Belé, the ancestral music and culture of Martinique is not just a dance, not just a drum, not just a way to see the world—it’s everywhere.

It’s my blueprint; I'm Belé-centric. It's my way. I believe that Belé is the only thing in that form that we have kept almost unchanged for centuries. It was there during slavery and is still here. It's evolved, but it’s rooted. It connects us to the soil. The education that we do. 

What do you hope to bring to the kids or the audience with this exhibition? 

Marcel: How I envision it is technology. Forms are framed as a little thing, like a tiny culture, “just drumming”. This is technology. Making a drum is a technique. It's not just something in the air. It's not a raw practice. It's something real that requires time and people to find the good way, creating something many people can use.

This garden, part of the core project in Permactivie, is technology, a tool for reconnection. We have compost coming from plants cut in the town to bring back to the garden soil with the kids. So the kids also see the whole thing. See that everything is connected. What they do has an effect. That’s a primary goal for the garden. 

Christel teaches kids a song she composed about the Seeds, Fonds Saint-Denis

Another is to keep people honest about our colonial past. The person who put Chlordane in the store was us. It's tragic, but it's real, enabled by assimilation. Most people who used it had gardens. Some of them obtained some Chlordane from the plantation to put in their gardens. How can you have something so complex, good, fertile, and use something so harmful, toxic, deadly? Because you don't trust in yourself or your culture enough. You also don't have a choice. You work in the plantation, they tell you to use it, so you do. 

Colonisation is delivered through and bolstered by the domination of knowledge. What was considered valuable was what white people brought. If they do it, we should do it. We don’t have to, but they made us think there’s only one way. The plantation is one crop for kilometres. One language, one religion, one God. Just like they say, to be a good person, to be human, is to be right. For some, it works, but it’s not for everybody. What’s interesting is that in the colonial times, we didn't truly fight back. In 1974, large protests erupted in Martinique to raise salaries and stop the use of Chlordane. They killed people. They raised the salary but continued to use Chlordane. That got me thinking, what could we do so that doesn't happen again?

Then, how does the bush serve as a form of resistance?

Marcel: A fundamental seed to plant in kids is to trust themselves, both as individuals and as Martinicans, to trust their culture. I hope that in Prêcheur, a town where many parents work on plantations, maybe the kids will do it differently. I hope when they're told to use Chlordane or whatever pesticide, they say no, or at least think about it. I love some Disney movies. How can I help my daughter have something else? I don't think we can compete. In Gaza, you can’t compete with bullets. 

What makes you throw the rock is not the belief that you’ll win; it's saying, 'We don’t accept.'

What can we give kids to help them not fight back, necessarily, because sometimes you can't win, but to stay mentally balanced with self-defined values and those of their ancestors? With love? Without that, there's nothing. Being born into a family that politicised me young, they gave me that privilege. It's the greatest gift. I can’t imagine not having that. Most people don’t. So, how can we give it to them?

Through Welto and the Sacred Bush, I hope to provide access not only to the children but to everyone curious about unlearning and reconnecting.  

After sifting compost the children observe an iule, Fonds Saint-Denis

Could you elaborate on the focus on sharing and connecting? How does that follow the anti-colonial blueprint, as seen in Béle, technology, and the gardens? 

Marcel: Connecting today is double-edged. On the one hand, practical communities, such as those that offer hands-on education and teach kids from start to finish, planting seeds in their homeland, are now gone. Today, you can be part of a community with someone in any country; it’s a higher level, a more distant kind of connection.  

On the other hand, the distant seed can sprout branches that reach across the globe. The first time I met Annalee was two years ago here in Berlin. Annalee took more than 12 hours by plane to come here. I took more than 12 hours by plane to come here, and then we connected. The key to the colonial project was division; they didn’t want people to connect, as this would keep their structures intact. Now that the plane is for everybody, how do you use that privilege?

We have things to share, not things to give, not things to prove. What justified the coloniser to colonise, to put people in slavery, was the idea that he wasn't human. I'm not trying to prove a point. We are human simply because we do things, and this is what we do. And, it's interesting to talk with people who do the same. In Berlin, it’s not something exotic; we are simply bringing this into conversation. If you want to know Belé, live in Martinique. In this exhibition, we share.

Children harvest lang vyé pods with Christel, Fonds Saint-Denis

How did the two of you connect? 

Annalee: Antonia connected us. Neither of us quite understood what the bigger picture was. But then we realised there was a connection in terms of responding to the land and understanding the difference between the geometry of the plantation, which is the practical application of geometry in its ordering, and the plot or the small garden that Marcel has been speaking about. It is the opposite of that. It doesn’t conform to these geometric principles. It follows another way of intercropping that may be seen as chaotic, but it has its own register.

I come from Barbados, which is both similar yet so different from Martinique. It was a British colony, but it’s a republic. Martinique remains a French colony. I was raised on a plantation. For all of us who are raised in a colonial project, it’s impossible for the colonial project not to be inside of us. My life’s work is about unlearning the plantation that sits inside of me. One way for me to do this is to form a more intimate relationship with the landscape outside the structure of the plantation. Beginning to have an awareness of plants that were used in the plot — the small plot given to enslaved people to grow food and their medicine. Growing my gardens became a way to form an intimacy with this landscape.

We were influenced by Malcolm Ferdinand, a Martinican writer who wrote Decolonial Ecology. He said very tragically that the Caribbean is the only place in the world that doesn’t have a motherland. It lost its motherland. This sense of being orphaned, the sense of grief we feel for losing most of our biodiversity to replace it with monocrop farming, in our case, sugarcane, and many banana plantations in Martinique. Less than 2% of our island has forests left.

How does the exhibition reflect the process of reconnecting with the land and ancestral practices?

Annalee: Permactivie’s education is so important because the curriculum in Martinique is still a French curriculum. Our curriculum is a Caribbean curriculum. What Marcel is doing is grounding these young people in their soil, history, plants, and Afro–French Caribbean traditions that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

An artwork in this exhibition, A Recuperative Gesture, features plants native to Martinique. I spent two weeks in Martinique with Marcel in April. It’s kind of like a mandala, a herbarium, unlike the colonial herbaria brought from the Caribbean to Europe as models of scientific study, but an invitation to look and receive.

It’s a mode of worship—the idea that the living world is sacred and worthy of our worship.

It responds against the colonial and Christian tradition of dominion over the land, rather than a relationship with it. This is about becoming familiar with the things that grow in our part of the world, many of which were also transplanted.

Through this, we recognise the value systems that we have so much to learn from. A great deal of our Afro-traditions were lost because these practices, collectively referred to as Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, were practised orally as a way to protect practitioners from being penalised or imprisoned. Up until the 1990s in Barbados, being involved in Obeah, like Voodoo, was illegal. For me, what's amazing about the Béle and the Lasotè is that they've been able to retain that tradition in the French Caribbean, which we've lost in many parts of the Anglophone Caribbean. The recuperative gesture for colonial spaces damaged by the colonial project is to listen to the land. How do we listen to it? Can you know a place through the way the breeze goes through the leaves of the tree?

The Caribbean is one of the most transformed geographic areas in the world due to the colonial project. It's difficult to cultivate this intimacy in a landscape that's been mediated by the colonial project for four centuries. These practices Marcel speaks about, growing these gardens and revering the living world—these are ways to reconnect.

A Recuperative Gesture, Annalee Davis

This exhibition will be on display for a year. What will the year-long structure look like?

Antonia: Creating exhibitions here for various reasons is about understanding that the moment the exhibition opens marks a beginning, not an end. That means a certain degree of indeterminacy, as people start engaging with the space and its artworks, as well as the knowledge and narratives brought into it, new conversations can begin. The idea is always that the exhibitions are an evolving terrain. It's not just two artworks go out, three artworks come in, and it's all predetermined. It’s about keeping flexibility for new narratives and conversations. That means the presence here plays a role in that path, shifting focus from transactionality to sharing.

What can we learn from Welto and the Sacred Bush here in Berlin?

Antonia: It's not only about the past, which many are unaware of. It’s about the present—social, political, and cultural systems that still define practising writing and producing culture and history, and that don’t take into account many of these aspects. These sophisticated ecological systems aren’t just in the Caribbean. Thanks to these systems, the majority of the world's biodiversity has been protected. For example, 80% of France's biodiversity is in Martinique. 8% of the world population is responsible for caring for 80% of the world's biodiversity.

What we try to turn around is not about solidarity or charity with groups elsewhere, but recognising that this knowledge and these practices are essential for the survival of the planet and human species.

That’s why we don’t put colonialism at the centre. It’s not just about reparations, though that’s fundamental, but about recognising the importance of preserving these practices for everyone. How do you bridge that knowledge? We’ve been collaborating with Permactivie for almost two years now. What we care about here is influencing public discourse, education, and environmental thinking, which is still largely focused on plastic bottles and electric cars.

That doesn’t take into account the need to change lifestyle. It’s just replacing an extractive economy with another. There’s little understanding or care about what that produces elsewhere. The entanglement between geographies, importing from everywhere but keeping wealth within European borders, shows how illusory the idea of “survival” is.

How does this story fit into the big picture of coloniality?

Antonia: With the war in Palestine and the far right rising across Europe, it’s not just Palestine. It’s everywhere. When I read Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, it was crystal clear. Colonialism is a beast you can’t feed. It eats everything. When it finishes eating the sauce, the global sauce, it comes back for you. That’s what Hitler did. That’s what’s going on now. People think things are expensive; welcome to our lives.

Berlin is one of the places where people can understand this. You have both sides, where the meeting happened. The far right, Mitterrand—he was a leftist but allowed the use of Chloridcone in Martinique when he was Minister of Agriculture. Same with Algeria. He was killing people. Same person. European countries label themselves—left, right, centre — but it's the same extractive project. It's never changed. It’s capitalism. Always about domination, “the one, the best” — competition.

Marcel: One thing I see changing with kids in school: in the garden, I told them, “You don’t have to run, you don’t have to be first. Don’t show off. Mostly, it damages things. There is no competition here. There is cooperation.” Being together. One person being the best doesn’t make sense; it’s about the group.

Last year, we had to say that many times—this year, only in the beginning. Even Izanbe said, “They’re so quiet and not disturbing. They were listening, not trying to be first.”

This is a way to relearn what truly matters.

Children's thank you to Marcel, Fonds Saint-Denis

Continue the conversation with Marcel, Annalee, and Antonia on Friday at Spore Initiative. More info here.

Photos courtesy of Marvin Systermans.