Voices Mag

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.