Haptic Hortus

Touching Plants, or: How to Turn a derelict Nail Salon into a Botanical Garden for Week

The multi sensorial installation „Haptic Hortus“ brings stories and experiences of encounters between plants and humans at the Botanical Gardens Berlin to a downtown site that holds complex histories of touch, too: a former nail salon right next to the urban gardening collective Prinzessinnengärten. „Haptic Hortus“, created by anthropologist and artist Susanne Schmitt, responds to the ethnographic research project „Touching Plants“ (FU Berlin).

During Science Week, the site-specific work will be activated through a sensory ethnography workshop with anthropologists Prof. Sandra Calkins and Cornelia Ertl, through a movement-oriented special edition of the experimental knowledge lab „Moving across Tresholds„, and a workshop with sound artist and composer Felix Classen where we explore acoustic hapticality and resounding contact making in a site shared by different forms of life.