Hidden Plant stories: The art of discovering human-plant entanglements in the grown Danish home
This project Stories studies Danish houseplants with a focus on the entanglements of symbolic meaning-makings, eco-material aspects, and cultural and plant histories through which the domestic green sphere of the home is grown and nourished.
The project is driven by the current call to revise our understanding of plants, prompted by the global climate and biodiversity crisis, which reveal how “we only are what and who we are because of what and how plants are” (Myers 2017).
The outline for this project are firstly, that plants are culture-nature hybrids deeply entangled with the human socio-cultural sphere. And secondly, that this human-plant entanglement brings global concerns into our local environments. We want to know how that ‘entanglement’ takes place within the domesticated space of the Danish home. With this project we explore the multitudes of stories convoluted into these mundane objects; the cultural story of the Danish bourgeois home, stories of gender, class, taste, stories of transnational trade and Europe’s colonial past, stories of biodiversity and climate crisis.
Methodologically, the project explores interior paintings from the 19th century, which bear witness to how bourgeois Danish home integrated plants into the socio-material home-making. Additionally, it studies the plant critique in contemporary. In its final dissemination, the project activates the museum as a forum for plant concerns with the exhibition Hidden Plant Stories in 2025.
The project is a collaboration between Aarhus University and Hirschsprung’s Collection and is generously supported by the Velux Foundation museum program.
