Voices Mag

In the wake of the Europe-wide MADE IN project, the Kunstgewerbemuseum brought together the textile designer Cécile Feilchenfeld and traditional Saxon businesses. We captured the process on film, through which she developed headdresses referencing Christmas trees from the Erzgebirge, silk flowers from Arnsdorf and porcelain from Meissen. They are currently on display at the Future Legacies exhibition at the Center ROG & MAO Slovenia in Ljubljana and will be available to see in Schneeberg starting in October.

They say that bad weeds grow tall. Where building projects have failed to do so, weeds often grow tall instead, bearing witness to the stranding of earlier ambitions. But how should we deal with such spaces in the city? What should we do with the craters left behind by failed building plans? A collective of creatives in Ljubljana finds answers.

In this article, Taiane Linhares introduces plant storytelling as a method for reconnecting to ancestral wisdom and relating to unfamiliar places and cultures. In her crash investigation during the Design Campus in Pillnitz, she used a family story involving a plant relative to develop connections to the royal garden’s Palmenhaus. The result of this research was a mixed-media piece expressing the local and global impacts of the colonisation process and its persistence.

Katharina Mludek took part in this year's Design Campus at the Museum of Decorative Arts, which was all about plant fever. She wrote for us about pleasure and play in the (Pillnitz) garden and about who actually cultivates whom in the garden.