Project description
The project is a collaboration between the School of Communication and Culture, the School of Culture and Society and the Department of Biology at Aarhus University and The Hirschsprung Collection.
With the ‘Hidden Plant Stories’ project, Aarhus University and The Hirschsprung Collection shed light on house plants as Danish cultural heritage, to uncover and create public awareness of the ‘hidden stories’ of these mundane everyday objects. Within the framework of this project, an interdisciplinary team of biologists, art historians and cultural historians will study Danish interior paintings from the 1800s that provide a unique testimony to the plants’ entry into the bourgeois Danish homes.
In the final exhibition, The Hirschsprung Collection is transformed into a polyphonic space for ‘plant stories’, where the audience’s personal plant stories will be in dialogue with house plant stories seen in historical paintings as well as the researchers knowledge of the plants’ cultural and breeding histories.