ENTER
CREATIVE CONSULTANCY X EXPERIENCE DESIGN
EXPLORING HUMAN AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN IMAGINATION AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY
BY SOPHIA WOLF
Carried by Winds, Tides, and Galaxies: Stories from Migrant Kin
Botanical Fabulations and the Cosmopoetics of Displacement
“Your purpose is to carry information. When you carry it, you make it accessible by frequency. Information is light.”
— Bringers of the Dawn, Barbara Marciniak
Intergalactic Migration
In 2024, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system at extraordinary speed, following a hyperbolic trajectory that prevents the Sun’s gravity from capturing it. Unlike typical comets and asteroids bound into predictable orbits, 3I/ATLAS will pass through once and continue onward into deep space.
Its origin is unknown. There is no evidence that it comes from Andromeda or the galactic centre. Based on its velocity and path, it is likely older than our solar system—formed around another star long ago, somewhere within the Milky Way. Its journey unfolds across distances and timescales that exceed human comprehension.
3I/ATLAS carries its own momentum, its own trajectory. Ancient ice, shaped by prolonged interstellar cold, is heated and altered as it passes our Sun. Matter transforms under exposure to light.
Symbolically, its passage feels unsettling: a foreign body entering a familiar system, reminding us that migration is not an exception but a condition—one that extends beyond the human, beyond the planetary, into the galactic.
Botanical Fabulations
In late June, in the heat of a Maltese summer—just days before 3I/ATLAS was first sighted—a small group gathers in the shade of a historic garden. Locals, expats, migrants. Together, they recall gardens and birds from places of origin, transit, and resettlement.
They speak of flowers blooming out of season, migratory birds blown off course, pollinators without land. Species navigating displacement alongside people.
Above them, the interstellar visitor moves silently into our inner solar system, unnoticed. Beneath the bougainvillea, a woman holds a fennel bulb in her hands.
“It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” she says. Thousands of miles away.
Botanical Fabulations is a women-led workshop for migrants and refugees in Malta, the fifth in a series organised by the Migrants Commission. The workshops draw on ethno-ecological approaches inspired by Mario Gerada, inviting people on the move to revisit experiences of being “out of place” through relationships with land, plants, and birds.
This gathering was inspired by Usama Al Shahmani’s In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, and by ethnobotanical and ethno-ornithological practices. Participants were invited into an experiential, poetic dialogue with the more-than-human world—where nature is not a metaphor, but a co-narrator.
Stories emerge that are rarely asked for.
“I miss the scents of my country,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic. “I try to grow them on my roof here, but the climate is so dry.”
“I miss the nightingale,” says a Ukrainian woman. Another participant recalls hearing one in a garden in Balzan. A Maltese man confirms that, though rare, it is possible.
Migration is not solely human. Birds are rerouted by climate and weather; seeds travel through pockets, recipes, rituals, and remedies. In exile, plants offer companionship, healing, and continuity. Survival often depends on these more-than-human relations.
“I’m growing vegetables from South America,” says a man from Colombia. “And medicinal herbs. I love touching the soil. It connects me to life.”
Fabulation as Practice
Like people, plants, and birds, 3I/ATLAS has travelled far from its origins, carrying memory without destination. Its brief passage mirrors the impermanence of exile—its presence marked only by a trace.
Botanical Fabulations rests on the belief that plants, seeds, and birds are not symbolic stand-ins but active participants. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of fabulation—storytelling that holds truth beyond linear time—the act of fabulating becomes a way to reclaim voice, culture, and connection.
Participants reimagine landscapes and narrate botanical memories of belonging and loss. As Haraway writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
“I remember my father’s fig tree,” a man says. “I want to plant fig, rosemary, basil. Build dry stone walls. Put up bat boxes. I’m growing Cuban oregano here—it’s thriving.”
Here, fabulation becomes both political and poetic: a refusal of erasure, a practice of re-rooting. More than a workshop, Botanical Fabulations becomes a space where stories cross borders and species—a site of re-worlding amid ecological collapse and forced displacement.
The woman with the fennel gives each of us a seed. Mine sprouts. That same week, I read of 3I/ATLAS being sighted from a telescope in Chile, slipping past our Sun.
A seed planted.
A star passed.
A story continuing elsewhere.
Resonance: A Gift for 3I/ATLAS
As 3I/ATLAS moves onward, it becomes a mirror rather than a threat. Its passing stirs buried narratives and dormant migrations of the self.
What resonance would you gift it from Earth?
A season.
A scent.
A birdsong.
A medicinal plant.
Choose one or assemble many. Sit with the memory it carries—its colour, texture, sound. Write it down. Burn it as an offering: of love, release, and transformation.
Carried by Winds, Tides, and Galaxies: Stories from Migrant Kin
Botanical Fabulations and the Cosmopoetics of Displacement
“Your purpose is to carry information. When you carry it, you make it accessible by frequency. Information is light.”
— Bringers of the Dawn, Barbara Marciniak
Intergalactic Migration
In 2024, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system at extraordinary speed, following a hyperbolic trajectory that prevents the Sun’s gravity from capturing it. Unlike typical comets and asteroids bound into predictable orbits, 3I/ATLAS will pass through once and continue onward into deep space.
Its origin is unknown. There is no evidence that it comes from Andromeda or the galactic centre. Based on its velocity and path, it is likely older than our solar system—formed around another star long ago, somewhere within the Milky Way. Its journey unfolds across distances and timescales that exceed human comprehension.
3I/ATLAS carries its own momentum, its own trajectory. Ancient ice, shaped by prolonged interstellar cold, is heated and altered as it passes our Sun. Matter transforms under exposure to light.
Symbolically, its passage feels unsettling: a foreign body entering a familiar system, reminding us that migration is not an exception but a condition—one that extends beyond the human, beyond the planetary, into the galactic.
Botanical Fabulations
In late June, in the heat of a Maltese summer—just days before 3I/ATLAS was first sighted—a small group gathers in the shade of a historic garden. Locals, expats, migrants. Together, they recall gardens and birds from places of origin, transit, and resettlement.
They speak of flowers blooming out of season, migratory birds blown off course, pollinators without land. Species navigating displacement alongside people.
Above them, the interstellar visitor moves silently into our inner solar system, unnoticed. Beneath the bougainvillea, a woman holds a fennel bulb in her hands.
“It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” she says. Thousands of miles away.
Botanical Fabulations is a women-led workshop for migrants and refugees in Malta, the fifth in a series organised by the Migrants Commission. The workshops draw on ethno-ecological approaches inspired by Mario Gerada, inviting people on the move to revisit experiences of being “out of place” through relationships with land, plants, and birds.
This gathering was inspired by Usama Al Shahmani’s In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, and by ethnobotanical and ethno-ornithological practices. Participants were invited into an experiential, poetic dialogue with the more-than-human world—where nature is not a metaphor, but a co-narrator.
Stories emerge that are rarely asked for.
“I miss the scents of my country,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic. “I try to grow them on my roof here, but the climate is so dry.”
“I miss the nightingale,” says a Ukrainian woman. Another participant recalls hearing one in a garden in Balzan. A Maltese man confirms that, though rare, it is possible.
Migration is not solely human. Birds are rerouted by climate and weather; seeds travel through pockets, recipes, rituals, and remedies. In exile, plants offer companionship, healing, and continuity. Survival often depends on these more-than-human relations.
“I’m growing vegetables from South America,” says a man from Colombia. “And medicinal herbs. I love touching the soil. It connects me to life.”
Fabulation as Practice
Like people, plants, and birds, 3I/ATLAS has travelled far from its origins, carrying memory without destination. Its brief passage mirrors the impermanence of exile—its presence marked only by a trace.
Botanical Fabulations rests on the belief that plants, seeds, and birds are not symbolic stand-ins but active participants. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of fabulation—storytelling that holds truth beyond linear time—the act of fabulating becomes a way to reclaim voice, culture, and connection.
Participants reimagine landscapes and narrate botanical memories of belonging and loss. As Haraway writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
“I remember my father’s fig tree,” a man says. “I want to plant fig, rosemary, basil. Build dry stone walls. Put up bat boxes. I’m growing Cuban oregano here—it’s thriving.”
Here, fabulation becomes both political and poetic: a refusal of erasure, a practice of re-rooting. More than a workshop, Botanical Fabulations becomes a space where stories cross borders and species—a site of re-worlding amid ecological collapse and forced displacement.
The woman with the fennel gives each of us a seed. Mine sprouts. That same week, I read of 3I/ATLAS being sighted from a telescope in Chile, slipping past our Sun.
A seed planted.
A star passed.
A story continuing elsewhere.
Resonance: A Gift for 3I/ATLAS
As 3I/ATLAS moves onward, it becomes a mirror rather than a threat. Its passing stirs buried narratives and dormant migrations of the self.
What resonance would you gift it from Earth?
A season.
A scent.
A birdsong.
A medicinal plant.
Choose one or assemble many. Sit with the memory it carries—its colour, texture, sound. Write it down. Burn it as an offering: of love, release, and transformation.
Sophia Wolf is a social researcher and cultural mediator specialising in migration and the Middle East. Her grassroots work blends biocultural storytelling with creative, participatory methods to support peacebuilding, community resilience, and the preservation of collective memory through ecological frameworks.
BY SOPHIA WOLF
Carried by Winds, Tides, and Galaxies: Stories from Migrant Kin
Botanical Fabulations and the Cosmopoetics of Displacement
“Your purpose is to carry information. When you carry it, you make it accessible by frequency. Information is light.”
— Bringers of the Dawn, Barbara Marciniak
Intergalactic Migration
In 2024, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system at extraordinary speed, following a hyperbolic trajectory that prevents the Sun’s gravity from capturing it. Unlike typical comets and asteroids bound into predictable orbits, 3I/ATLAS will pass through once and continue onward into deep space.
Its origin is unknown. There is no evidence that it comes from Andromeda or the galactic centre. Based on its velocity and path, it is likely older than our solar system—formed around another star long ago, somewhere within the Milky Way. Its journey unfolds across distances and timescales that exceed human comprehension.
3I/ATLAS carries its own momentum, its own trajectory. Ancient ice, shaped by prolonged interstellar cold, is heated and altered as it passes our Sun. Matter transforms under exposure to light.
Symbolically, its passage feels unsettling: a foreign body entering a familiar system, reminding us that migration is not an exception but a condition—one that extends beyond the human, beyond the planetary, into the galactic.
Botanical Fabulations
In late June, in the heat of a Maltese summer—just days before 3I/ATLAS was first sighted—a small group gathers in the shade of a historic garden. Locals, expats, migrants. Together, they recall gardens and birds from places of origin, transit, and resettlement.
They speak of flowers blooming out of season, migratory birds blown off course, pollinators without land. Species navigating displacement alongside people.
Above them, the interstellar visitor moves silently into our inner solar system, unnoticed. Beneath the bougainvillea, a woman holds a fennel bulb in her hands.
“It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” she says. Thousands of miles away.
Botanical Fabulations is a women-led workshop for migrants and refugees in Malta, the fifth in a series organised by the Migrants Commission. The workshops draw on ethno-ecological approaches inspired by Mario Gerada, inviting people on the move to revisit experiences of being “out of place” through relationships with land, plants, and birds.
This gathering was inspired by Usama Al Shahmani’s In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, and by ethnobotanical and ethno-ornithological practices. Participants were invited into an experiential, poetic dialogue with the more-than-human world—where nature is not a metaphor, but a co-narrator.
Stories emerge that are rarely asked for.
“I miss the scents of my country,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic. “I try to grow them on my roof here, but the climate is so dry.”
“I miss the nightingale,” says a Ukrainian woman. Another participant recalls hearing one in a garden in Balzan. A Maltese man confirms that, though rare, it is possible.
Migration is not solely human. Birds are rerouted by climate and weather; seeds travel through pockets, recipes, rituals, and remedies. In exile, plants offer companionship, healing, and continuity. Survival often depends on these more-than-human relations.
“I’m growing vegetables from South America,” says a man from Colombia. “And medicinal herbs. I love touching the soil. It connects me to life.”
Fabulation as Practice
Like people, plants, and birds, 3I/ATLAS has travelled far from its origins, carrying memory without destination. Its brief passage mirrors the impermanence of exile—its presence marked only by a trace.
Botanical Fabulations rests on the belief that plants, seeds, and birds are not symbolic stand-ins but active participants. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of fabulation—storytelling that holds truth beyond linear time—the act of fabulating becomes a way to reclaim voice, culture, and connection.
Participants reimagine landscapes and narrate botanical memories of belonging and loss. As Haraway writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
“I remember my father’s fig tree,” a man says. “I want to plant fig, rosemary, basil. Build dry stone walls. Put up bat boxes. I’m growing Cuban oregano here—it’s thriving.”
Here, fabulation becomes both political and poetic: a refusal of erasure, a practice of re-rooting. More than a workshop, Botanical Fabulations becomes a space where stories cross borders and species—a site of re-worlding amid ecological collapse and forced displacement.
The woman with the fennel gives each of us a seed. Mine sprouts. That same week, I read of 3I/ATLAS being sighted from a telescope in Chile, slipping past our Sun.
A seed planted.
A star passed.
A story continuing elsewhere.
Resonance: A Gift for 3I/ATLAS
As 3I/ATLAS moves onward, it becomes a mirror rather than a threat. Its passing stirs buried narratives and dormant migrations of the self.
What resonance would you gift it from Earth?
A season.
A scent.
A birdsong.
A medicinal plant.
Choose one or assemble many. Sit with the memory it carries—its colour, texture, sound. Write it down. Burn it as an offering: of love, release, and transformation.
Carried by Winds, Tides, and Galaxies: Stories from Migrant Kin
Botanical Fabulations and the Cosmopoetics of Displacement
“Your purpose is to carry information. When you carry it, you make it accessible by frequency. Information is light.”
— Bringers of the Dawn, Barbara Marciniak
Intergalactic Migration
In 2024, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system at extraordinary speed, following a hyperbolic trajectory that prevents the Sun’s gravity from capturing it. Unlike typical comets and asteroids bound into predictable orbits, 3I/ATLAS will pass through once and continue onward into deep space.
Its origin is unknown. There is no evidence that it comes from Andromeda or the galactic centre. Based on its velocity and path, it is likely older than our solar system—formed around another star long ago, somewhere within the Milky Way. Its journey unfolds across distances and timescales that exceed human comprehension.
3I/ATLAS carries its own momentum, its own trajectory. Ancient ice, shaped by prolonged interstellar cold, is heated and altered as it passes our Sun. Matter transforms under exposure to light.
Symbolically, its passage feels unsettling: a foreign body entering a familiar system, reminding us that migration is not an exception but a condition—one that extends beyond the human, beyond the planetary, into the galactic.
Botanical Fabulations
In late June, in the heat of a Maltese summer—just days before 3I/ATLAS was first sighted—a small group gathers in the shade of a historic garden. Locals, expats, migrants. Together, they recall gardens and birds from places of origin, transit, and resettlement.
They speak of flowers blooming out of season, migratory birds blown off course, pollinators without land. Species navigating displacement alongside people.
Above them, the interstellar visitor moves silently into our inner solar system, unnoticed. Beneath the bougainvillea, a woman holds a fennel bulb in her hands.
“It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” she says. Thousands of miles away.
Botanical Fabulations is a women-led workshop for migrants and refugees in Malta, the fifth in a series organised by the Migrants Commission. The workshops draw on ethno-ecological approaches inspired by Mario Gerada, inviting people on the move to revisit experiences of being “out of place” through relationships with land, plants, and birds.
This gathering was inspired by Usama Al Shahmani’s In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, and by ethnobotanical and ethno-ornithological practices. Participants were invited into an experiential, poetic dialogue with the more-than-human world—where nature is not a metaphor, but a co-narrator.
Stories emerge that are rarely asked for.
“I miss the scents of my country,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic. “I try to grow them on my roof here, but the climate is so dry.”
“I miss the nightingale,” says a Ukrainian woman. Another participant recalls hearing one in a garden in Balzan. A Maltese man confirms that, though rare, it is possible.
Migration is not solely human. Birds are rerouted by climate and weather; seeds travel through pockets, recipes, rituals, and remedies. In exile, plants offer companionship, healing, and continuity. Survival often depends on these more-than-human relations.
“I’m growing vegetables from South America,” says a man from Colombia. “And medicinal herbs. I love touching the soil. It connects me to life.”
Fabulation as Practice
Like people, plants, and birds, 3I/ATLAS has travelled far from its origins, carrying memory without destination. Its brief passage mirrors the impermanence of exile—its presence marked only by a trace.
Botanical Fabulations rests on the belief that plants, seeds, and birds are not symbolic stand-ins but active participants. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of fabulation—storytelling that holds truth beyond linear time—the act of fabulating becomes a way to reclaim voice, culture, and connection.
Participants reimagine landscapes and narrate botanical memories of belonging and loss. As Haraway writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
“I remember my father’s fig tree,” a man says. “I want to plant fig, rosemary, basil. Build dry stone walls. Put up bat boxes. I’m growing Cuban oregano here—it’s thriving.”
Here, fabulation becomes both political and poetic: a refusal of erasure, a practice of re-rooting. More than a workshop, Botanical Fabulations becomes a space where stories cross borders and species—a site of re-worlding amid ecological collapse and forced displacement.
The woman with the fennel gives each of us a seed. Mine sprouts. That same week, I read of 3I/ATLAS being sighted from a telescope in Chile, slipping past our Sun.
A seed planted.
A star passed.
A story continuing elsewhere.
Resonance: A Gift for 3I/ATLAS
As 3I/ATLAS moves onward, it becomes a mirror rather than a threat. Its passing stirs buried narratives and dormant migrations of the self.
What resonance would you gift it from Earth?
A season.
A scent.
A birdsong.
A medicinal plant.
Choose one or assemble many. Sit with the memory it carries—its colour, texture, sound. Write it down. Burn it as an offering: of love, release, and transformation.
Sophia Wolf is a social researcher and cultural mediator specialising in migration and the Middle East. Her grassroots work blends biocultural storytelling with creative, participatory methods to support peacebuilding, community resilience, and the preservation of collective memory through ecological frameworks.
BY SOPHIA WOLF
Carried by Winds, Tides, and Galaxies: Stories from Migrant Kin
Botanical Fabulations and the Cosmopoetics of Displacement
“Your purpose is to carry information. When you carry it, you make it accessible by frequency. Information is light.”
— Bringers of the Dawn, Barbara Marciniak
Intergalactic Migration
In 2024, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system at extraordinary speed, following a hyperbolic trajectory that prevents the Sun’s gravity from capturing it. Unlike typical comets and asteroids bound into predictable orbits, 3I/ATLAS will pass through once and continue onward into deep space.
Its origin is unknown. There is no evidence that it comes from Andromeda or the galactic centre. Based on its velocity and path, it is likely older than our solar system—formed around another star long ago, somewhere within the Milky Way. Its journey unfolds across distances and timescales that exceed human comprehension.
3I/ATLAS carries its own momentum, its own trajectory. Ancient ice, shaped by prolonged interstellar cold, is heated and altered as it passes our Sun. Matter transforms under exposure to light.
Symbolically, its passage feels unsettling: a foreign body entering a familiar system, reminding us that migration is not an exception but a condition—one that extends beyond the human, beyond the planetary, into the galactic.
Botanical Fabulations
In late June, in the heat of a Maltese summer—just days before 3I/ATLAS was first sighted—a small group gathers in the shade of a historic garden. Locals, expats, migrants. Together, they recall gardens and birds from places of origin, transit, and resettlement.
They speak of flowers blooming out of season, migratory birds blown off course, pollinators without land. Species navigating displacement alongside people.
Above them, the interstellar visitor moves silently into our inner solar system, unnoticed. Beneath the bougainvillea, a woman holds a fennel bulb in her hands.
“It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” she says. Thousands of miles away.
Botanical Fabulations is a women-led workshop for migrants and refugees in Malta, the fifth in a series organised by the Migrants Commission. The workshops draw on ethno-ecological approaches inspired by Mario Gerada, inviting people on the move to revisit experiences of being “out of place” through relationships with land, plants, and birds.
This gathering was inspired by Usama Al Shahmani’s In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, and by ethnobotanical and ethno-ornithological practices. Participants were invited into an experiential, poetic dialogue with the more-than-human world—where nature is not a metaphor, but a co-narrator.
Stories emerge that are rarely asked for.
“I miss the scents of my country,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic. “I try to grow them on my roof here, but the climate is so dry.”
“I miss the nightingale,” says a Ukrainian woman. Another participant recalls hearing one in a garden in Balzan. A Maltese man confirms that, though rare, it is possible.
Migration is not solely human. Birds are rerouted by climate and weather; seeds travel through pockets, recipes, rituals, and remedies. In exile, plants offer companionship, healing, and continuity. Survival often depends on these more-than-human relations.
“I’m growing vegetables from South America,” says a man from Colombia. “And medicinal herbs. I love touching the soil. It connects me to life.”
Fabulation as Practice
Like people, plants, and birds, 3I/ATLAS has travelled far from its origins, carrying memory without destination. Its brief passage mirrors the impermanence of exile—its presence marked only by a trace.
Botanical Fabulations rests on the belief that plants, seeds, and birds are not symbolic stand-ins but active participants. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of fabulation—storytelling that holds truth beyond linear time—the act of fabulating becomes a way to reclaim voice, culture, and connection.
Participants reimagine landscapes and narrate botanical memories of belonging and loss. As Haraway writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
“I remember my father’s fig tree,” a man says. “I want to plant fig, rosemary, basil. Build dry stone walls. Put up bat boxes. I’m growing Cuban oregano here—it’s thriving.”
Here, fabulation becomes both political and poetic: a refusal of erasure, a practice of re-rooting. More than a workshop, Botanical Fabulations becomes a space where stories cross borders and species—a site of re-worlding amid ecological collapse and forced displacement.
The woman with the fennel gives each of us a seed. Mine sprouts. That same week, I read of 3I/ATLAS being sighted from a telescope in Chile, slipping past our Sun.
A seed planted.
A star passed.
A story continuing elsewhere.
Resonance: A Gift for 3I/ATLAS
As 3I/ATLAS moves onward, it becomes a mirror rather than a threat. Its passing stirs buried narratives and dormant migrations of the self.
What resonance would you gift it from Earth?
A season.
A scent.
A birdsong.
A medicinal plant.
Choose one or assemble many. Sit with the memory it carries—its colour, texture, sound. Write it down. Burn it as an offering: of love, release, and transformation.
Carried by Winds, Tides, and Galaxies: Stories from Migrant Kin
Botanical Fabulations and the Cosmopoetics of Displacement
“Your purpose is to carry information. When you carry it, you make it accessible by frequency. Information is light.”
— Bringers of the Dawn, Barbara Marciniak
Intergalactic Migration
In 2024, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system at extraordinary speed, following a hyperbolic trajectory that prevents the Sun’s gravity from capturing it. Unlike typical comets and asteroids bound into predictable orbits, 3I/ATLAS will pass through once and continue onward into deep space.
Its origin is unknown. There is no evidence that it comes from Andromeda or the galactic centre. Based on its velocity and path, it is likely older than our solar system—formed around another star long ago, somewhere within the Milky Way. Its journey unfolds across distances and timescales that exceed human comprehension.
3I/ATLAS carries its own momentum, its own trajectory. Ancient ice, shaped by prolonged interstellar cold, is heated and altered as it passes our Sun. Matter transforms under exposure to light.
Symbolically, its passage feels unsettling: a foreign body entering a familiar system, reminding us that migration is not an exception but a condition—one that extends beyond the human, beyond the planetary, into the galactic.
Botanical Fabulations
In late June, in the heat of a Maltese summer—just days before 3I/ATLAS was first sighted—a small group gathers in the shade of a historic garden. Locals, expats, migrants. Together, they recall gardens and birds from places of origin, transit, and resettlement.
They speak of flowers blooming out of season, migratory birds blown off course, pollinators without land. Species navigating displacement alongside people.
Above them, the interstellar visitor moves silently into our inner solar system, unnoticed. Beneath the bougainvillea, a woman holds a fennel bulb in her hands.
“It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” she says. Thousands of miles away.
Botanical Fabulations is a women-led workshop for migrants and refugees in Malta, the fifth in a series organised by the Migrants Commission. The workshops draw on ethno-ecological approaches inspired by Mario Gerada, inviting people on the move to revisit experiences of being “out of place” through relationships with land, plants, and birds.
This gathering was inspired by Usama Al Shahmani’s In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, and by ethnobotanical and ethno-ornithological practices. Participants were invited into an experiential, poetic dialogue with the more-than-human world—where nature is not a metaphor, but a co-narrator.
Stories emerge that are rarely asked for.
“I miss the scents of my country,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic. “I try to grow them on my roof here, but the climate is so dry.”
“I miss the nightingale,” says a Ukrainian woman. Another participant recalls hearing one in a garden in Balzan. A Maltese man confirms that, though rare, it is possible.
Migration is not solely human. Birds are rerouted by climate and weather; seeds travel through pockets, recipes, rituals, and remedies. In exile, plants offer companionship, healing, and continuity. Survival often depends on these more-than-human relations.
“I’m growing vegetables from South America,” says a man from Colombia. “And medicinal herbs. I love touching the soil. It connects me to life.”
Fabulation as Practice
Like people, plants, and birds, 3I/ATLAS has travelled far from its origins, carrying memory without destination. Its brief passage mirrors the impermanence of exile—its presence marked only by a trace.
Botanical Fabulations rests on the belief that plants, seeds, and birds are not symbolic stand-ins but active participants. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of fabulation—storytelling that holds truth beyond linear time—the act of fabulating becomes a way to reclaim voice, culture, and connection.
Participants reimagine landscapes and narrate botanical memories of belonging and loss. As Haraway writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
“I remember my father’s fig tree,” a man says. “I want to plant fig, rosemary, basil. Build dry stone walls. Put up bat boxes. I’m growing Cuban oregano here—it’s thriving.”
Here, fabulation becomes both political and poetic: a refusal of erasure, a practice of re-rooting. More than a workshop, Botanical Fabulations becomes a space where stories cross borders and species—a site of re-worlding amid ecological collapse and forced displacement.
The woman with the fennel gives each of us a seed. Mine sprouts. That same week, I read of 3I/ATLAS being sighted from a telescope in Chile, slipping past our Sun.
A seed planted.
A star passed.
A story continuing elsewhere.
Resonance: A Gift for 3I/ATLAS
As 3I/ATLAS moves onward, it becomes a mirror rather than a threat. Its passing stirs buried narratives and dormant migrations of the self.
What resonance would you gift it from Earth?
A season.
A scent.
A birdsong.
A medicinal plant.
Choose one or assemble many. Sit with the memory it carries—its colour, texture, sound. Write it down. Burn it as an offering: of love, release, and transformation.
Sophia Wolf is a social researcher and cultural mediator specialising in migration and the Middle East. Her grassroots work blends biocultural storytelling with creative, participatory methods to support peacebuilding, community resilience, and the preservation of collective memory through ecological frameworks.
BY SOPHIA WOLF
Carried by Winds, Tides, and Galaxies: Stories from Migrant Kin
Botanical Fabulations and the Cosmopoetics of Displacement
“Your purpose is to carry information. When you carry it, you make it accessible by frequency. Information is light.”
— Bringers of the Dawn, Barbara Marciniak
Intergalactic Migration
In 2024, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system at extraordinary speed, following a hyperbolic trajectory that prevents the Sun’s gravity from capturing it. Unlike typical comets and asteroids bound into predictable orbits, 3I/ATLAS will pass through once and continue onward into deep space.
Its origin is unknown. There is no evidence that it comes from Andromeda or the galactic centre. Based on its velocity and path, it is likely older than our solar system—formed around another star long ago, somewhere within the Milky Way. Its journey unfolds across distances and timescales that exceed human comprehension.
3I/ATLAS carries its own momentum, its own trajectory. Ancient ice, shaped by prolonged interstellar cold, is heated and altered as it passes our Sun. Matter transforms under exposure to light.
Symbolically, its passage feels unsettling: a foreign body entering a familiar system, reminding us that migration is not an exception but a condition—one that extends beyond the human, beyond the planetary, into the galactic.
Botanical Fabulations
In late June, in the heat of a Maltese summer—just days before 3I/ATLAS was first sighted—a small group gathers in the shade of a historic garden. Locals, expats, migrants. Together, they recall gardens and birds from places of origin, transit, and resettlement.
They speak of flowers blooming out of season, migratory birds blown off course, pollinators without land. Species navigating displacement alongside people.
Above them, the interstellar visitor moves silently into our inner solar system, unnoticed. Beneath the bougainvillea, a woman holds a fennel bulb in her hands.
“It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” she says. Thousands of miles away.
Botanical Fabulations is a women-led workshop for migrants and refugees in Malta, the fifth in a series organised by the Migrants Commission. The workshops draw on ethno-ecological approaches inspired by Mario Gerada, inviting people on the move to revisit experiences of being “out of place” through relationships with land, plants, and birds.
This gathering was inspired by Usama Al Shahmani’s In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, and by ethnobotanical and ethno-ornithological practices. Participants were invited into an experiential, poetic dialogue with the more-than-human world—where nature is not a metaphor, but a co-narrator.
Stories emerge that are rarely asked for.
“I miss the scents of my country,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic. “I try to grow them on my roof here, but the climate is so dry.”
“I miss the nightingale,” says a Ukrainian woman. Another participant recalls hearing one in a garden in Balzan. A Maltese man confirms that, though rare, it is possible.
Migration is not solely human. Birds are rerouted by climate and weather; seeds travel through pockets, recipes, rituals, and remedies. In exile, plants offer companionship, healing, and continuity. Survival often depends on these more-than-human relations.
“I’m growing vegetables from South America,” says a man from Colombia. “And medicinal herbs. I love touching the soil. It connects me to life.”
Fabulation as Practice
Like people, plants, and birds, 3I/ATLAS has travelled far from its origins, carrying memory without destination. Its brief passage mirrors the impermanence of exile—its presence marked only by a trace.
Botanical Fabulations rests on the belief that plants, seeds, and birds are not symbolic stand-ins but active participants. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of fabulation—storytelling that holds truth beyond linear time—the act of fabulating becomes a way to reclaim voice, culture, and connection.
Participants reimagine landscapes and narrate botanical memories of belonging and loss. As Haraway writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
“I remember my father’s fig tree,” a man says. “I want to plant fig, rosemary, basil. Build dry stone walls. Put up bat boxes. I’m growing Cuban oregano here—it’s thriving.”
Here, fabulation becomes both political and poetic: a refusal of erasure, a practice of re-rooting. More than a workshop, Botanical Fabulations becomes a space where stories cross borders and species—a site of re-worlding amid ecological collapse and forced displacement.
The woman with the fennel gives each of us a seed. Mine sprouts. That same week, I read of 3I/ATLAS being sighted from a telescope in Chile, slipping past our Sun.
A seed planted.
A star passed.
A story continuing elsewhere.
Resonance: A Gift for 3I/ATLAS
As 3I/ATLAS moves onward, it becomes a mirror rather than a threat. Its passing stirs buried narratives and dormant migrations of the self.
What resonance would you gift it from Earth?
A season.
A scent.
A birdsong.
A medicinal plant.
Choose one or assemble many. Sit with the memory it carries—its colour, texture, sound. Write it down. Burn it as an offering: of love, release, and transformation.
Carried by Winds, Tides, and Galaxies: Stories from Migrant Kin
Botanical Fabulations and the Cosmopoetics of Displacement
“Your purpose is to carry information. When you carry it, you make it accessible by frequency. Information is light.”
— Bringers of the Dawn, Barbara Marciniak
Intergalactic Migration
In 2024, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system at extraordinary speed, following a hyperbolic trajectory that prevents the Sun’s gravity from capturing it. Unlike typical comets and asteroids bound into predictable orbits, 3I/ATLAS will pass through once and continue onward into deep space.
Its origin is unknown. There is no evidence that it comes from Andromeda or the galactic centre. Based on its velocity and path, it is likely older than our solar system—formed around another star long ago, somewhere within the Milky Way. Its journey unfolds across distances and timescales that exceed human comprehension.
3I/ATLAS carries its own momentum, its own trajectory. Ancient ice, shaped by prolonged interstellar cold, is heated and altered as it passes our Sun. Matter transforms under exposure to light.
Symbolically, its passage feels unsettling: a foreign body entering a familiar system, reminding us that migration is not an exception but a condition—one that extends beyond the human, beyond the planetary, into the galactic.
Botanical Fabulations
In late June, in the heat of a Maltese summer—just days before 3I/ATLAS was first sighted—a small group gathers in the shade of a historic garden. Locals, expats, migrants. Together, they recall gardens and birds from places of origin, transit, and resettlement.
They speak of flowers blooming out of season, migratory birds blown off course, pollinators without land. Species navigating displacement alongside people.
Above them, the interstellar visitor moves silently into our inner solar system, unnoticed. Beneath the bougainvillea, a woman holds a fennel bulb in her hands.
“It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” she says. Thousands of miles away.
Botanical Fabulations is a women-led workshop for migrants and refugees in Malta, the fifth in a series organised by the Migrants Commission. The workshops draw on ethno-ecological approaches inspired by Mario Gerada, inviting people on the move to revisit experiences of being “out of place” through relationships with land, plants, and birds.
This gathering was inspired by Usama Al Shahmani’s In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, and by ethnobotanical and ethno-ornithological practices. Participants were invited into an experiential, poetic dialogue with the more-than-human world—where nature is not a metaphor, but a co-narrator.
Stories emerge that are rarely asked for.
“I miss the scents of my country,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic. “I try to grow them on my roof here, but the climate is so dry.”
“I miss the nightingale,” says a Ukrainian woman. Another participant recalls hearing one in a garden in Balzan. A Maltese man confirms that, though rare, it is possible.
Migration is not solely human. Birds are rerouted by climate and weather; seeds travel through pockets, recipes, rituals, and remedies. In exile, plants offer companionship, healing, and continuity. Survival often depends on these more-than-human relations.
“I’m growing vegetables from South America,” says a man from Colombia. “And medicinal herbs. I love touching the soil. It connects me to life.”
Fabulation as Practice
Like people, plants, and birds, 3I/ATLAS has travelled far from its origins, carrying memory without destination. Its brief passage mirrors the impermanence of exile—its presence marked only by a trace.
Botanical Fabulations rests on the belief that plants, seeds, and birds are not symbolic stand-ins but active participants. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of fabulation—storytelling that holds truth beyond linear time—the act of fabulating becomes a way to reclaim voice, culture, and connection.
Participants reimagine landscapes and narrate botanical memories of belonging and loss. As Haraway writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
“I remember my father’s fig tree,” a man says. “I want to plant fig, rosemary, basil. Build dry stone walls. Put up bat boxes. I’m growing Cuban oregano here—it’s thriving.”
Here, fabulation becomes both political and poetic: a refusal of erasure, a practice of re-rooting. More than a workshop, Botanical Fabulations becomes a space where stories cross borders and species—a site of re-worlding amid ecological collapse and forced displacement.
The woman with the fennel gives each of us a seed. Mine sprouts. That same week, I read of 3I/ATLAS being sighted from a telescope in Chile, slipping past our Sun.
A seed planted.
A star passed.
A story continuing elsewhere.
Resonance: A Gift for 3I/ATLAS
As 3I/ATLAS moves onward, it becomes a mirror rather than a threat. Its passing stirs buried narratives and dormant migrations of the self.
What resonance would you gift it from Earth?
A season.
A scent.
A birdsong.
A medicinal plant.
Choose one or assemble many. Sit with the memory it carries—its colour, texture, sound. Write it down. Burn it as an offering: of love, release, and transformation.
Sophia Wolf is a social researcher and cultural mediator specialising in migration and the Middle East. Her grassroots work blends biocultural storytelling with creative, participatory methods to support peacebuilding, community resilience, and the preservation of collective memory through ecological frameworks.