REPORT: Reworking the Ecological – A Reflection about the 4A_Lab Academy

Led by Dr. Hannah Baader and the remarkable team of the 4A_Lab, the Academy convened an extraordinary constellation of thinkers, makers, and practitioners, and embedded them within the collections of Berlin’s state museums. Ecological Entanglements across Collections unfolded as a series of critical encounters among historians of art, science, knowledge, and the sensorium, alongside conservators, museum professionals, artists, scientists, theorists, and anthropologists, fostering a heightened attention to the ecological fabric underpinning socio-cultural entanglements, articulated through sensorial experiences, artistic techniques, materialities, and political climates. Each day unfolded in a different institution, introducing a new set of objects and epistemological challenges. What emerged was a vast and generative web—roots, lines, and branches intertwined in a mesh of ideas, events, and accidents that traditional models of historical inquiry would have kept apart.

Discussions ranged from pictorial representations of plants in Islamic illuminated manuscripts and European paintings to experimental studies of plant perception and the role of taste as an epistemological tool—as in the case of seventeenth-century scholars and enthusiastic amateurs who explored the world by tasting it, one piece at a time. Other case studies examined plant sensoria, from potted plants dropped down a slide in Carsten Höller and Stefano Mancuso’s contemporary scientific experiments to early 20th-century studies that, as Sria Chatterjee showed, linked plant sensorium to modernization ideologies and Hindu nationalism. The technological mediation of potted plants exhibited as art in museum galleries in the 1970s—closely monitored by myriads of sensors—further underscored, as Christopher Williams-Wynn demonstrated, the interplay between botanical life, coloniality, and institutional control. Etienne Benson’s discussion of the bureaucratization of ecological aesthetics in landscape conservation, particularly in the work of Luna Leopold in the 1960s, added another dimension to these debates about perception, mediation, and control.

Material histories emerged as a crucial site of inquiry. Discussions about Amazonian artifacts, displaced by colonial extractive networks, now located at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut and designated as German national treasures, highlighted ongoing debates about restitution. Ceremonial drums from the Pacific, acquired through systems of gift and exchange, underscored the entanglement of anthropological fieldwork, indigenous reciprocity, and museum economies. Anna Blume’s analysis of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of Guatemala explored the reproducibility of skies in early wet-plate photography—where identical clouds, artificially composed using collodion derived from wood pulp, reappeared across different sites. This material, also used in surgical wound dressings, revealed a cross-species techno-ecological entanglement that linked photography, medicine, and industrial production in new ways.

The sonic and performative dimensions of botanical knowledge also took center stage. One performance critically engaged with sound archives and rethought modes of interaction, while another staged Renaissance and Baroque plant songs on a harp before Hugo van der Goes’ The Adoration of the Kings (Monforte Altarpiece). Meanwhile, the architectural modernization of the Pergamon Museum positioned olfactory and sensory engagement as a central curatorial concern for the future display of Islamic art.

A visit to the Natural History Museum’s storage facility provided another lens through which to view ecological time. The paleo-botanical collection housed an extraordinary array of fossilized plants embedded in layers of sedimented rock—stable and requiring minimal environmental conditioning, yet rarely displayed in museums. The fragility and care of museum objects also shaped our discussions. Wooden musical instruments, which require precise humidity regulation, exemplified the delicate balance between conservation and material longevity. Giovanni Aloi proposed reconfiguring the botanical gaze through a critical installation in the botanical garden, while Peter Schneemann explored a history of artistic engagement with remediation of brownfields, community gardens, and the role of plants as actors in artistic and political resistance.

Throughout these debates, the limits of conservation and the ethics of preservation became evident as entangled with broader planetary histories of extractivism, environmental degradation, and institutional economies of care. Botanical gardens were reimagined as artistic sites, while shifting museological epistemologies revealed tensions between historical continuity and rupture. Questions of coloniality, reparations, and conservation recurred in different forms, intersecting with broader concerns about sites of toxicity, ecological endurance, political resistance, and institutional control.

Ecological Entanglements demonstrated, with intensity and precision, the need to dissolve disciplinary boundaries, and showed how such intersections can reconfigure historiographical and epistemological frameworks. This Academy was one of the most incisive explorations of ecocritical studies and museology that I have recently encountered, interweaving methodologies across disciplines in ways that continue to resonate with my research and that of my fellow participants. More than proposing new methodological approaches, it critically examined the ethical and political stakes of working with historical objects, landscapes, and infrastructures, underscoring the urgency of rethinking knowledge production in light of contemporary ecological and decolonial imperatives.

Read more about the 2024 4A_Lab Academy