Voices Mag

The garden at the Japanisches Palais is a place where human beings, plants and animals can be said to coexist. It is a place where ecological cycles can be seen and natural processes observed. In a museum’s inner courtyard, however, we are caught between teaching people about the topics of the future and preserving valuable art by preventing pest damage. How can that balance be maintained?

If you happened to sit under the hop-draped pergola in the garden of the Japanisches Palais in May or June, you may well have been surprised by how sticky the leaves were. If you looked more closely, you will have spotted hundreds of minute black insects clinging to the plant stems or the undersides of the leaves: aphids.

This year, the Design Campus at the Kunstgewerbemuseum is all about plants. In their opening lecture for the Design School, design duo d-o-t-s, who also curated the exhibition Plant Fever, call for a rethinking of the relationship between humans and plants. d-o-t-s on the invention of the salt shaker and rooting robots.

At the beginning of every project, there is always a trigger, a motive. It can be an intuition, a book, or an article… What sparked the idea of Plant Fever, was a conversation that Laura Drouet had with the Italian design duo Dossofiorito. Learning about their plant-conscious practice, one question arose: were there other creatives looking at the vegetal realm with respect and curiosity, using design as a means to establish senseful relationships with plants the way in which Dossofiorito were doing? ? Could this be the subject of an exhibition?