Ecological Entanglements across Collections - Plant Lives and Beyond - Day 4

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 four will consider communication between vegetal/non-human life forms and Plants, Sensory Interactions and Language in Early Modern Europe, that will reflect on perceptions, the senses, sound, smell, music, and feelings in and through plant natures before Modernity. It will lead into the collections of Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie and the holdings of the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung and the Musikinstrumenten-Museum.

Thursday, 7 November 2024

Kulturforum, KGM Lecture Hall

PANEL III

Plants and the Senses in Visual, Linguistic, and Sound Cultures 

CHAIR 

Stefan Neuner (Universität der Künste Berlin)

10. 15

Lea Viehweger (4A_Lab)

Capturing Scent? Flowers in Early 16th Century German Portraits between the Sensory and the Symbolic

11. 00

Daniela Hacke (Freie Universität Berlin) and Jason C. J. Terry (Freie Universität Berlin) 

"We have no words for many." Senses and Language in 17th Century English Colonial Botany

RESPONDENT 

Jasmin Mersmann (Freie Universität Berlin)

12. 00

Ulrike G. K. Wegst (Northeastern University, Boston) and Rebecca Wolf (Director, Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Berlin)

Materials and Materiality in Music

13. 00 Lunch Break

14. 00 
COLLECTION WORKSHOP – participants only 

Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Musikinstrumenten-Museum  

Holz hören/The Audibility of Wood with Rebecca Wolf (Director, Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Berlin) and Ulrike G. K. Wegst (Northeastern University, Boston) 
Workshop on the diversity of wood in musical instrument making based on the collection of the Musikinstrumenten-Museum. 

16. 00

VISIT AND SOLO PERFORMANCE *  

Gemäldegalerie, Gallery Space

Solo Performance by Margret Koell, historical baroque harp

Plant Songs in Renaissance and Baroque Music

17. 00

PUBLIC GUIDED TOUR *

Gemäldegalerie, Gallery space

Parallel guided tours with Lea Viehweger (4A_Lab)  

Nightshade, Men’s Fidelity, and Star’s Herb: Plants in Portraits by Albrecht Dürer and Contemporaries 

and Stephan Kemperdick (Curator, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) 

Pflanzenbilder. Sprache, Sinne, Malkunst 

in English and German 

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.