Ecological Entanglements across Collections - Plant Lives and Beyond - Day 1

The interdisciplinary 4A Lab Academy, "Ecological Entanglements across Collections – Plant Lives and Beyond," takes place from 4–8 November 2024, in collaboration with the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. The Academy builds on the ecocritical turn in the humanities and explores 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, the Academy invites participants to collectively (re)think human entanglements with vegetal and non-human life, in dialogue with the collections of the SPK.

Day one will open the discussions with a critical reassessment of environmental thought as inseparable from religious and political constellations, racial and colonial dominations, the arts, the history of science, and plant biology—reflected in Discourses, Imaginaries, and Common Sense. 

Monday, 4 November 2024

Forschungscampus Dahlem, Foyer

10:00 | Welcome & Introduction to the Academy by KHI & SPK

Barbara Göbel (Director, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, SPK, Berlin) and Hannah Baader (4_Lab/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, MPI)  

WORKSHOP         

Ecological Entanglements and Aesthetic Practices: Reassessing Discourses, Imaginations, and Common Sense

10:15 | Introduction 

Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, MPI)  

10:30 | Reconfiguring the Botanical Gaze: Fighting Plant Blindness to Embrace Rewilding

Giovanni Aloi (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Moderation and Discussion: Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, MPI)

11:15 | Maya Cloud Forests and Muybridge Photographs: A Study of Root Memory and the Optical Unconscious

Anna Blume (State University of New York, FIT), Moderation and Discussion: Julia Voss (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin/Leuphana University, Lüneburg)

13:30 | The Empty Lot: Of Remediating Brownfields and Resisting Vegetation 

Peter J. Schneemann (Universität Bern), Moderation and Discussion: Linn Burchert (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich)

14:15 | Aesthetic Impact Assessment, 1949/1969

Etienne Benson (Max PIanck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Moderation and Discussion: Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, MPI) 

16:00 | PRESENTATION: Curating and Creating Relations between Lived Worlds: A Practice-Oriented Methodology for Museum Engagements with Indigenous Communities from Amazonia

Thiago da Costa Oliveira (Research Fellow Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin)

Moderation: Patricia Rahemipour (Institut für Museumsforschung, Berlin)

17:00 | LECTURE: Ecological Wisdom for a Collective Future: If We Listen, Plants Will Teach Us

Monica Gagliano (Southern Cross University, Lismore), Moderation and Discussion: Julia Voss (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin/Leuphana Universität, Lüneburg)

18: 00 | Reception 

Welcome by Hermann Parzinger (President, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz)

Forschungscampus Dahlem, Lecture Hall

19: 00 | LECTURE PERFORMANCE : Holding Patterns; An Archive of Atmospheres

By artists and academics Kate Donovan (Berlin) and Ella Finer (London)
An artistic research-exchange project across the Ethnological Museum, Phonogram Archive, and Natural History Museum, Berlin, as well as the British Library Sound Archive and Natural History Museum, London. In cooperation with Maurice Mengel (Head, Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin) and Albrecht Wiedmann (Curator, Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin)

The international Research and Fellowship Program "4A Lab: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics" is a cooperation between the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.