Ecological Entanglements across Collections - Plant Lives and Beyond - Day 2

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 two will focus on the critical appraisal of the colonial legacies in Environmentalism in Contemporary Art after 1970.

Tuesday, 5 November 2024

Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Aktionsraum

PANEL I           

Colonial Coordinates of Ecology and Contemporary Art

10. 30

Welcome & Introduction

Gabriele Knapstein (Deputy Director and Head of Collections, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, SPK, Berlin) and Hannah Baader (4A_Lab/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, MPI)

CHAIR

Eric de Bruyn (Freie Universität Berlin)

10. 45

Christopher Williams-Wynn (4A_Lab)

“A Framework for Control and Change:” Coloniality and Ecology at the Centre for Art and Communication, c. 1971

11. 15

Zachary Caple (Aarhus University/Duke University, Durham)

A Digested Land: The Industrial Metabolism and Auto-rewilding of Bone Valley, Florida

11. 45

Sria Chatterjee (Paul Mellon Centre, London)

Political Plants

RESPONDENT

Peter J. Schneemann (Universität Bern) 

13. 00 Lunch Break

CHAIR

Robert Stock (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) 

14. 00

James Nisbet (University of California, Irvine)

Illustrating Invasion 

14. 30

André Rottmann (Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt/O.)

Masks and Machines: Notes on AI Ecologies and Decolonial Thought

RESPONDENT

Anna Blume (State University of New York, FIT)

DISCUSSANTS

Giovanni Aloi (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Anna Blume (State University of New York, FIT), Monica Gagliano (Southern Cross University, Lismore), Peter J. Schneemann (Universität Bern)

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.