Im Jahr 2024 wird das Grundgesetz 75 Jahre alt. Es verankert Versprechen wie Menschenwürde und Grundrechte. Sollten wir unser Grundgesetz erweitern, um der Natur Rechte zuzusprechen?

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.

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?

Inspired by ongoing initiatives and projects of contemporary international designers, engineers, artists and writers, the following phyto-based actions are not addressed solely to practitioners, but call for everyone's (including producers’ and consumers’) sense of respect, responsibility, equity and empathy towards plants. They should be read not as rules but as invitations to see the world through the perspective of plants.