Event date
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Podsumowanie
For the 23rd Triennale Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Architecture in Milan, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław will present the 'Greenhouse Silent Disco' installation, on display from July 15 to December 11.
Content
Triennale Milano is a key international event in design and architecture, and this year’s theme is 'Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries'. Its main goals are to initiate a discussion on the future challenges facing our planet and to contemplate what still remains unknown to us in the modern world.
Curated by Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber and Michał Duda, the Greenhouse Silent Disco exhibition ties in with the Triennale’s theme by referencing the Romantic concept of experiencing nature both sensually and bodily, and empathising with it. The project was inspired by the research of renowned plant physiologist Professor Hazem Kalaji of the Agriculture and Biology Department at Warsaw University of Life Sciences, who has devised a method of monitoring the condition of individual plants and entire ecosystems.
The installation, designed by Barbara Nawrocka and Dominika Wilczyńska (Miastopracownia), takes the form of a plant-filled greenhouse that enables direct contact between people and plants. It is equipped with digital sensors hooked up to computer systems that monitor and record everything the plants 'say', i.e. how they react to specific needs and variables, such as somebody's presence, or changes in external atmospheric conditions. The 'language' of plants will be expressed via LEDs of changing colours, as well as sounds, into which they are transformed by the computer.
Text
The greenhouse of the future is a disco, where LEDs change from blue to red and white according to the plants' needs: for instance, when it’s cloudy or rainy outside the greenhouse.
The idea to revive a Romantic approach to nature is fitting in this, the Year of Polish Romanticism.
Text
In Romanticism, nature sheds its illustrative function and turns into an instrument of cognition. Humans become part of nature, and nature itself is a means of experiencing the world. The Romantics believed that a person may only truly be themselves amid nature. So, we must begin by imagining a design that acquires knowledge from plants – as it turns out, it is possible.
Author
Michał Duda, deputy director of the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław
The exhibition is curated by Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber and Michał Duda, who have coordinated numerous design and architecture exhibitions and publications, including Three Beginnings, 1918/1945/1989. The exhibition architecture was designed by the Miastopracownia duo: Barbara Nawrocka and Dominika Wilczyńska. The scientific concept was devised by Prof. Hazem Kalaji of the Agriculture and Biology Department at Warsaw University of Life Sciences. The graphic visual identification for the Polish pavilion was co-designed by Nicola Cholewa and Magdalena Heliasz.
https://triennale.org/eventi/polonia-greenhouse-silent-disco
The installation was created on the initiative of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, in conjunction with the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław. The project was co-funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.