Plants in the Light of Art and Archives – A Visual Documentation

From 4–8 November 2024 the 4A_Lab, a research and fellowship program of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (KHI) in cooperation with the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK), organized the interdisciplinary Academy “Ecological Entanglements across Collections – Plant Lives and Beyond” in Berlin. For 5 days, at 7 locations, and in 8 formats—experts and an interested audience discussed current ways of thinking about vegetable life in art in dialogue with the collections of the SPK. Through a series of panels, lectures, workshops, collection visits, and performances, participants collectively explored the role of plant life in artistic and aesthetic practices, human knowledge production, and theoretical critical thinking across histories, communities and geographies.

The 4A_Lab program has provided young academics with the opportunity to conduct research in the SPK’s collections since 2019. It seemed high time to discuss their explorations around the topic of plant lives and its manifold entanglements with art and aesthetics, history and colonialism, biology and economics. The Academy conceptually built on the ecocritical turn in the humanities while embracing the humans’ inseparable connectedness and existential dependency to plant life. Yet the practice through which reciprocity, human/non-human kinship and mutual exchange can be achieved, and how they can be studied, are under debate across disciplines. Recent studies have highlighted for example how these organisms, far from being passive receivers at the other end of the life spectrum, are endowed with active forms of sensory perception. This new awareness is calling for novel paradigms of historical and transhistorical inquiry, focusing on the wide range of interactions between humans and plants across time and space.

For all of these reasons, the 4A_Lab Academy invited the general public to partake in a series of lectures, collection workshops, performances, site visits, and guided tours, and to investigate the complex relationships between plant lives, museums, and collections. The different formats provided an opportunity to engage with specific objects and collections, and to explore the ranges, scales, aesthetics, and politics of ecological entanglements, across time – from vegetal fossils at the depot of the Museum für Naturkunde and plant photography at the Museum für Fotografie to wooden music instruments at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum and medicinal plants in portraits of the 16^th century at the Gemäldegalerie. The Academy’s diverse thematic, methodological and stylistic approaches offered many novel perspectives on the SPK’s collection.

Biologist Monica Gagliano, for instance, proposed in her lecture that instead of conducting research in the bipolar tension between plants and humans, we should strive for a “multivalence” of the sciences. In his lecture, science historian Etienne Benson pointed out the entanglement of science, aesthetics, and politics by discussing the bureaucratization of ecological aesthetics in landscape conservation in the mid-twentieth century.

Addressing the question of what can be learned for the future from art objects and aesthetic practices and their histories, the participants looked at artistic creations from the early modern period to the present, across the planet. While experts brought various museum collections worldwide into focus, it was a particular highlight when curators at the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz opened their doors and provided insights into plant worlds from the perspective of their collection treasures. The result was a practiced “bio-contact zone” in the museum, as art historian Liliana Gómez tried to grasp the link of plant and human life printed on colonial photographs. Paired with the aspirations to include the potentials of indigenous knowledges and practices, Brazilian researcher Thiago Lopes da Costa Oliveira highlighted the potential to improve humans’ collaboration with plants in the future.

The KHI is grateful to all its partners, speakers, participants, and listeners. It was a great pleasure. Our particular thanks goes to our partners and hosts at the Forschungscampus Dahlem, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, the Museum für Fotografie/Kunstbibliothek, the Gemäldegalerie, the Musikinstrumenten-Museum/Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, as well as the Museum für Naturkunde.

Read more about the 2024 4A_Lab Academy