Vegetation under Power

The starting point for the 2021 Bauhaus Lab program is an herbarium of leaves preserved from 1931 by botanist Hans Weber. This collection is an inventory of flora gathered around Bitterfeld, a city known for its chemical industrial complex during the GDR. Throughout the twentieth century, this area close to the Bauhaus underwent drastic transformations driven by the rapid development of opencast brown coal mines, the erection of power plants and the proliferation of chemical factories. The excavation and monumental movement of soil, the redirection of rivers, the relocation of villages, the chemical alteration of ground, air and water, and the radical impacts of these processes on the region’s vegetal and animal life did not go unnoticed: they were accompanied by various institutional and citizen-led practices of care. It's through opening these folders that the Lab group investigates the complex entanglements of human and nonhuman actors, technologies, material flows, socialities, and moral orders that engulf this object and the post-industrial landscape of Bitterfeld.

The exhibition is the outcome of three months of collective archival research in the Bitterfeld Kreismuseum, interviews of workers in the GDR coal and chemical industries, curation, and exhibition design.
In collaboration with Lili Carr, 
Maya Errázuriz, Shaiwanti Gupta, Pierre Klein, Elisabetta Rattalino, Shivani Shedde, Nancy Valladares

Partners:
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Kreismuseum Bitterfeld
Photo: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau / Thomas Meyer / OSTKREUZ