Abstract Living Ground is an artistic research project by Freya Hattenberger in cooperation with the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, the U'mista Cultural Centre (Canada), and the University of Cologne.

The title denotes living soil as counter-concept to the toxic legacies of colonial photography. The project critically engages with colonial image archives, starting from late 19th-century Kwakwaka'wakw portraits in ethnographic collections – products of extractive practices that rendered people as objects. These images continue to shape visual memory and, through AI, reproduce stereotypes.

The project asks: How can these silent images be translated into living relationships? How can agency over representation be returned to descendants?

In collaboration with the U'mista Cultural Centre (whose name means "return of valuable things"), Living Ground develops a decolonial visual practice extending repatriation artistically. The methodology employs plant-based photographic processes (anthotype, chlorophyll printing), recognizing non-human actors – plants, light, seasons – as co-authors. In participatory workshops, historical photographs are re-introduced and new "Living Portraits" co-created with family members.

This holds particular significance in Alert Bay, where Residential Schools ruptured cultural continuities. Accompanying recordings ("Archives in Conversation") interweave oral tradition with image formation: a narrative's duration determines exposure time, a family history guides plant choice. Voice, memory, and image coalesce; a silent archive is brought to life.

The contribution demonstrates how artistic research activates endangered conceptual worlds as epistemic resources, understanding photography as relational practice that transcends colonial extractivist logics through dialogical, ecologically embedded processes.