Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing

Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing

Pop-up Exhibition + Public Events at C-SPACE Berlin
March 1 - 8, 2026

Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing is a photographic pop-up exhibition and public program organized by RIFS Fellow Adina-Iuliana Deacu exploring what becomes possible when nature is given time, space, and agency to heal after periods of extraction, acceleration, and neglect. The works document landscapes where plants slowly reclaim concrete, rusted infrastructure transforms into habitat, and abandoned structures evolve into ecosystems. Rather than framing these sites as symbols of decay, the exhibition invites viewers to see them as quiet testimonies of regeneration, patience, and resilience.

The exhibition opens on March 1st, a date that in Romania (Adina’s growing up environment) traditionally marks the beginning of spring through the celebration of Mărțișor—a cultural ritual centered on renewal, balance, and the return of life after winter. More broadly, March carries symbolic meaning across many cultures as a threshold between dormancy and awakening: in Balkan traditions such as Bulgaria’s Baba Marta, in the ancient Roman calendar where March once marked the start of the year and the agricultural cycle, in the Persian cultural sphere leading toward Nowruz at the spring equinox, and within East Asian seasonal philosophies that associate early March with the stirring of life and the shift from yin toward yang. Positioned within this wider cultural understanding of spring as a time of rebirth and re-emergence, the exhibition situates ecological regeneration alongside personal and societal renewal, framing healing as a gradual, relational process rather than a sudden transformation.

The opening event on March 1st introduces both the exhibition and the research practice behind it. Drawing from Adina’s ongoing work at the Research Institute for Sustainability at GFZ (RIFS) and her eight years of social entrepreneurship, the opening presents a working redefinition of business as “an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in a financially sustainable way.” Visitors are invited to reflect on how dominant ideas of growth, productivity, and success shape not only economies, but also inner worlds, career choices, and perceptions of what is possible. The opening is designed as an accessible, contemplative gathering rather than a formal vernissage, creating space for curiosity, dialogue, and slowing down.

On March 3rd, the exhibition is accompanied by a practical workshop focused on redefining business beyond profit-centered models, inviting participants to explore how social value creation and financial sustainability can be aligned in practice. The workshop offers a hands-on extension of the exhibition’s conceptual questions, translating reflection into concrete experimentation.

On March 5th an online event will be held, bringing together business founders and practitioners from Europe, Africa, and Asia who are already building ventures grounded in social value creation rather than extractive growth. The event showcases concrete, lived examples of businesses operating as vehicles for solving social issues while remaining financially sustainable, offering participants real-world reference points that complement the exhibition’s metaphors and the workshop’s prototyping processes.

The exhibition period concludes on March 8th with a reflective closing event held in connection with International Women’s Day, centering on the concept of the Invisible Backpack and examining how early life environments shape confidence, agency, and perceived possibilities in business, leadership, and life. This final gathering creates space to reflect on inequality beyond surface-level categories, while honoring regeneration as both a personal and collective process.

Together, the exhibition and its four public events form a coherent journey, from visual encounter, to conceptual framing, to practical exploration, and finally to embodied reflection, extending Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing beyond visual experience into a living, dialogical space for imagining alternative futures.

For details and registration for each public event please check below the respective links:

March 1st [Insert registration link 1 here] Link 1: https://eveeno.com/popupexhibitionlaunch

March 3rd [Insert registration link 2 here] Link 2: https://eveeno.com/workshopredefiningbusiness

March 5th[Insert registration link here] https://www.rifs-potsdam.de/en/events/rehumanizing-profit-redefining-business-regenerative-future

March 8th [Insert registration link 4 here] Link 4: https://eveeno.com/theinvisiblebackpack

Pop-up Exhibition Launch

March 1, 2026 | 15:00–18:00 (CET)

Venue: C-SPACE Berlin

This opening event marks the beginning of Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing and introduces both the photographic exhibition and the research-practice context from which it emerges. The event invites participants into a quiet, reflective encounter with landscapes where nature is slowly reclaiming human-built environments, offering visual entry points into broader questions of regeneration, time, and ecological agency.

Participants can expect a gentle introduction to the exhibition and its research context, including a short talk, guided tour, and open conversation exploring regeneration, healing, and what it means to rethink growth, success, and business beyond profit.

The opening event overview and detailed agenda can be found in the menu under Info.

Drawing from RIFS Fellow Adina-Iuliana Deacu’s ongoing work at the Research Institute for Sustainability at GFZ (RIFS) and her eight years of social entrepreneurship, the opening presents a working redefinition of business as “an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in a financially sustainable way.” Rather than approaching this as an abstract theory, the opening explores how this shift in definition is deeply connected to how we imagine growth, success, productivity, and worth, both collectively and individually.

The event combines a short introductory talk, a guided tour through selected photographic works, and open conversation. It is intentionally designed as an accessible, contemplative gathering rather than a formal vernissage, creating space for slowing down, sensing, and reflecting. Participants are invited to consider how patterns of extraction visible in landscapes mirror patterns within economic systems and personal lives and how regeneration, in all these dimensions, often unfolds quietly and non-linearly.

The opening sets the conceptual and emotional tone for the week, framing the exhibition as a space of inquiry, imagination, and gentle questioning.

Agenda

• 15:00–15:20 | Welcome & Context
  • Introduction to the exhibition concept and its origins
  • Short overview of the research journey connecting environmental psychology, regenerative economics, and social entrepreneurship
• 15:20–15:45 | Short Lecture
  • From profit-centered models to social-value-creating entities
  • How landscapes that heal can serve as metaphors for economic and personal regeneration
• 15:45–16:30 | Guided Exhibition Tour
  • Walkthrough of selected photographic works
  • Reflections on ecological agency, time, and non-linear healing
• 16:30–17:30 | Open Q&A & Group Conversation
  • Participants’ impressions and questions
  • Dialogue on alternative futures of work, business, and wellbeing
• 17:30–18:00 | Informal Networking
  • Light refreshments
  • One-on-one conversations and quiet viewing

Who is this for?

• Entrepreneurs and founders
• Freelancers and independent professionals
• Creatives, designers, and artists
• Researchers and students
• People interested in sustainability, social impact, and regenerative futures
• Community members curious about alternative ways of living, working, and organizing

No prior knowledge of art, business, or academic theory is required. The event welcomes anyone open to reflection, imagination, and gentle questioning of inherited assumptions.

What will participants gain?

Participants will gain a conceptual and sensory entry point into the exhibition’s themes, a clearer understanding of the regenerative definition of business, and new language to reflect on growth, success, and possibility in their own lives and work.

Workshop — Redefining Business: From Profit-Centered to Social-Value-Creating Models

March 3 | 14:00–18:00 (CET)

Venue: C-SPACE Berlin

This practical, interactive workshop forms an integral part of the Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing pop-up exhibition and extends its central inquiry from visual reflection into hands-on exploration. It is designed for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and individuals interested in starting a business who are questioning conventional, profit-only definitions of success. The workshop is built around the new working definition of business proposed by RIFS Fellow Adina-Iuliana Deacu: A business is an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in a financially sustainable way.

Rather than treating social impact as an “add-on” or marketing layer, the session invites participants to explore how this definition can become the core organizing principle of their business or business idea. The focus is on hands-on reflection and redesign, enabling participants to translate values, lived experience, and social concerns into viable business models or professional paths around social value creation and financial sustainability.

The workshop overview and detailed agenda can be found in the menu under Info.

Across the exhibition, visitors will encounter landscapes where nature slowly reclaims human-built environments, offering quiet reminders that regeneration is possible when conditions shift from extraction toward care. This workshop translates that insight into the economic and professional realm, inviting participants to explore what becomes possible when business is reimagined as a vehicle for solving social issues and creating social value in a financially sustainable way, instead of a profit-generating machine.

The workshop is built around a new working definition of business:

A business is an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in a financially sustainable way.

Rather than treating social impact as an add-on or moral extra, the session invites participants to explore how this definition can become the core organizing principle of their work or business idea. The focus is on hands-on reflection and redesign. Participants will explore how their values, lived experiences, and social concerns can become foundations for economically viable initiatives, rather than obstacles to financial sustainability.

Through a combination of short inputs, guided reflection, small-group dialogue, and simple prototyping exercises, participants will:

• Identify the social issues their work already touches or could address
• Examine inherited assumptions about money, value, growth, and success
• Reframe an existing business, project, or idea through the proposed definition
• Sketch an initial business logic that aligns social value creation with financial sustainability

The emphasis is on experimentation, peer learning, and sense-making rather than arriving at fixed answers. Within the broader exhibition, this workshop serves as a bridge between seeing regeneration and practicing it, supporting participants in translating the metaphors of healing landscapes into concrete, life-embedded economic experiments.

Workshop Agenda

• 14:00–14:20 | Arrival & Grounding Ice-Breaker

  A short, guided exercise inviting participants to reflect on:

  • Why they are drawn to entrepreneurship or independent work

  • What questions or tensions they carry around money, value, impact, and sustainability

    This opening sets a shared, human-centered tone and connects personal motivations to the exhibition’s themes of regeneration and renewal.
     

• 14:20–15:00 | Context & Conceptual Framing

  A short input introducing:

  • The exhibition’s core inquiry into regeneration and healing
  • The working definition of business as an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in a financially sustainable way

  • Common inherited assumptions about profit, growth, scarcity, and success and how these shape business design

    Concrete examples are used to ground the discussion and challenge common misconceptions (e.g. “impact means earning less” or “social value belongs outside business”).
     

• 15:00–17:00 | Group Work: Redesigning Business Through a Regenerative Lens

  Participants work individually and in small groups to:

  • Identify the social issues their current work or ideas already touch
  • Examine invisible assumptions influencing their business thinking
  • Reframe their business, project, or early-stage idea through the proposed definition

  • Sketch an initial regenerative business logic that aligns social value creation with financial sustainability

    The emphasis is on reflection, experimentation, and peer learning rather than polished outcomes.
     

• 17:00–18:00 | Sharing, Dialogue & Integration
  • Self-selected participants share insights, tensions, and questions that emerged
  • Open Q&A and collective reflection

  • Closing integration connecting personal redesign processes back to the exhibition’s visual metaphors of regeneration

    Participants leave with a clearer sense of direction and language for articulating their work.

Who is this for?

This workshop is designed for:

• Entrepreneurs and founders (early-stage or established)
• Freelancers and independent professionals
• People exploring or preparing to start a business or project
• Creatives, researchers, and practitioners navigating hybrid careers
• Individuals interested in social innovation, sustainability, and regenerative economic models

No prior business training is required. The workshop welcomes participants from diverse professional and cultural backgrounds who are curious about doing business differently and aligning their work with social value and meaning.

What will participants gain?

Participants will leave with an initial reframed version of their business idea or professional direction, practical tools for aligning social value creation with financial sustainability, and insights gained through peer exchange.

Closing Event: The Invisible Backpack: Early Environments, Inequality, and Possibility (International Women’s Day Reflection & Exhibition Closing)

March 8 | 15:00–18:00 (CET)

Venue: C-SPACE Berlin

The closing event of Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing brings the exhibition’s exploration of regeneration into dialogue with questions of inequality, agency, and inner landscapes. While the photographic works invite reflection on how nature heals when given time and space, this final gathering turns attention inward toward the invisible conditions that shape what people believe is possible for them in life, work, leadership, and business.

Participants can expect a reflective and dialogical space to explore how early life environments shape confidence, agency, and perceived possibilities, integrating personal insight with the exhibition’s broader themes of regeneration and healing.

The workshop overview and detailed agenda can be found in the menu under Info.

Centered on the concept of the Invisible Backpack, the event explores how early life environments—family dynamics, education systems, cultural narratives, social expectations, trauma—quietly accumulate over time, shaping confidence, ambition, risk tolerance, and perceived entitlement. These invisible layers often determine who feels allowed to aspire, to lead, to take risks, or to redefine success long before formal inequalities become visible.

Held in connection with International Women’s Day, the event reflects on gender not as a standalone category, but as one dimension within a broader web of early conditioning. The session also includes a reflective sharing of RIFS Fellow Adina-Iuliana Deacu’s own Invisible Backpack as a female entrepreneur—how her early environments shaped her sense of possibility, relationship to money and risk, and the path through which she came to redefine business as a vehicle for social value creation. This personal reflection is offered not as a model to emulate, but as an entry point for collective sense-making.

As the final event of the exhibition, this gathering offers a space to integrate visual, conceptual, and personal insights accumulated over the week. It marks an ending, but also gestures toward regeneration as an ongoing process that involves not only systems and structures, but also healing inherited assumptions about who we are and what we are allowed to become.

Agenda

• 15:00–15:20 | Arrival & Grounding
  • A gentle opening moment inviting participants to slow down, arrive fully, and reconnect with the exhibition space one last time.

• 15:20–16:00 | Reflective Input: The Invisible Backpack & a Lived Journey

  A short reflective talk introducing the Invisible Backpack framework alongside a sharing of the facilitator’s own Invisible Backpack as a female entrepreneur, exploring:

  • How early environments shaped confidence, agency, and perceived possibility
  • How these early imprints influenced relationship to money, risk, and leadership

  • Why redefining business as social value creation emerged from lived experience

    This input situates personal narrative as an entry point into collective reflection.

• 16:00–17:10 | Guided Group Dialogue

  Participants engage in facilitated small-group and collective reflection to:

  • Identify elements of their own Invisible Backpacks
  • Examine assumptions they carry about success, limitation, and entitlement

  • Share insights in a supportive, non-judgmental space

    The emphasis is on listening, resonance, and meaning-making rather than problem-solving.

• 17:10–17:40 | Integration & Collective Reflection
  • Bringing personal reflections back into dialogue with the exhibition’s themes of regeneration and healing
  • Exploring what it means to “reclaim” agency, both individually and collectively
• 17:40–18:00 | Closing Ritual & Farewell
  • Participants are invited to take a postcard featuring an image from the exhibition as a symbolic reminder of regeneration, possibility, and continuity beyond the exhibition space and share what stays with them from the event moving forward.

Target Audience

This closing event is open to all genders:

• Entrepreneurs, leaders, freelancers, and independent professionals
• Creatives, researchers, and practitioners
• People interested in inequality, wellbeing, and personal agency
• Anyone curious about how early life experiences shape who we become

No prior familiarity with the exhibition, business, or academic frameworks is required. The event welcomes participants seeking reflection, connection, and a deeper understanding of how regeneration begins within.

What will participants gain?

Participants will gain deeper awareness of their own Invisible Backpacks, greater clarity about internalized assumptions shaping their choices, and a sense of reclaimed agency around what they are allowed to imagine and become.