SPK Berlin

Foivos Geralis, KHI Travel Grantee (Princeton University), reflects on his participation in the 4A_Lab Academy in Berlin last November. As an architectural historian studying ecologies of displacement, migration, and acclimatization across human, more-than-human, and art-object networks, he traces the interwoven visual, ecological, and political dimensions of plant-human relations that structured the Academy’s discussions around a constellation of thematic clusters. His account of the 4A_Lab Academy not only delineates the boundaries of a developing research field but also emphasizes the need for ethical and political reconsiderations.

The interdisciplinary 4A_Lab Academy “Ecological Entanglements across Collections – Plant Lives and Beyond” took place in Berlin from 4–8 November 2024 in collaboration with the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK). The academy built on the ecocritical turn in the humanities and explored the role of plant life in artistic and aesthetic practices, human knowledge production, and theoretical critical thinking across histories, communities, and geographies. Through a series of panels, lectures, workshops, collection visits, and performances at 7 locations and in 8 formats, the academy invited participants to collectively (re)think human entanglements with vegetal and non-human life, in dialogue with the collections of the SPK.