VEGETATION UNDER POWER

project type - Editorial, Visual Identity, Exhibition
photos - © Thomas Meyer
year - 2021

Following the Bauhaus Dessau corporate design guidelines, graphic elements were designed for Vegetation under Power exhibition.The Kreismuseum Bitterfeld, Bitterfeld’s county museum, contains a black box with herbaria dating from 1931. This collection, compiled by botanist Hans Weber, is an inventory of the flora gathered in the nearby Goitzsche region, a forested area of floodplains. Taking the herbaria as its starting point, Vegetation under Power interweaves stories about Bitterfeld’s energy-defined landscape with the modern legacy of the Bauhaus. The exhibition presents a landscape formed by 11 constellations: Poetics/Politics, Evidences, Sediments, Traces, Socialities, Recordings, Imprints, Extractions, Un/rootings, Stewardships, and Annotations, linking the plant collection to public debates on forest dieback, nature conservation, air pollution and growing environmental awareness, highlighting the relationship between ecology and economy. Using archival documents, interventions and field studies, the transformation of nature is related to the history of the Bauhaus.
The dynamic interplay of these facts gives rise to questions about how we care for and preserve landscapes that are seemingly irretrievably lost. What does it mean to care for post-industrial landscapes? And how can we push for the renaturation of our environment today?