Practices

Field Notes, Historiography, Plants, Practices, Spatial Orders

The Transnational and Interdisciplinary Journey of Gärtnerisches Planzeichnen

Villa Parey was built in 1895–1896 as the family house of Paul Parey, founder of the publishing house Paul Parey Verlag. The company was unrivalled in the fields of agriculture, horticulture, forestry as well as plantation technologies, with some publications relating directly to the colonial project of the Kaiserreich. Others had more unexpected effects on landscape history and urban gardening, as in the case of Max Bertram’s Gärtnerisches Planzeichnen (1891) in Meiji Japan.

Jung-Hwa Kim

Field Notes, Historiography, Objects, Practices, Technologies

Faunal Nature Printing: Traces of Life in Sherman Denton’s Moths and Butterflies (1900)

Nature self-printing (Naturselbstdruck) is a printing technique that consists in pressing the coloured surface of an object directly onto paper, hereby imprinting the page with a distinctive, non-reproducible image. In this article, 4A_Lab Fellow Judith Elisabeth Weiss traces the history and development of nature prints, highlighting some crucial issues in 19th-century discourses around nature, aesthetics, and art.

Judith Elisabeth Weiss

Architectures, Media Library, Plants, Practices, Spatial Orders

VIDEO: The Forest Cons: Sylvan Reflections within Architectural Imaginaries, by Dan Handel

Architect and curator Dan Handel explores the multifaceted ways in which forests are being conceived, experienced, and transfigured through human imagination, shedding light on how silvan epiphanies may find correspondence in spatial orders and architectural designs. The talk took place on December 13, 2021 as part of the 4A_Lab online seminar series.

4A_Lab

Architectures, Historiography, Media Library, Practices, Spatial Orders

VIDEO: The Last Gift from Beijing: the Jesuit Gardens and the Sino-European Botanical Exchanges, by Lianming Wang

In this 4A_Lab talk, Lianming Wang contextualizes the Beijing Jesuit gardens in the framework of global dynamics of horticultural and hydraulic practice as places of fruitful transcultural encounter and scientific knowledge production. The event took place on July 12, 2021 as part of the 4A_Lab online seminar series.

4A_Lab

Media Library, Objects, Plants, Practices

VIDEO: Images and Psychotropic Plants in Mesoamerica, by Johannes Neurath

The consumption of hallucinogens in ritual settings was—and to some extent still is—a common practice in Mesoamerica; yet, the artistic and aesthetic implications of this phenomenon have received little attention. In this talk, Johannes Neurath presents his research on the art inspired by psychotropic experiences in the context of Mesoamerican shamanic rituals. The talk took place on October 13, 2020 as part of the 4A_Lab online seminar series.

4A_Lab

Field Notes, Objects, Plants, Practices

Sullu Sullu, an Abortifacient Plant at the Service of the Inca Empire

Human beings are rarely represented in the art produced in the heartland of the Inca Empire. However, in the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin we find a remarkable exception: a ceramic jar from the Cusco region on which six women are depicted holding a tree branch with two flowers sprouts. Who are these women, and what was the nature of their relationship with the plant?

Bat-Ami Artzi