The Adam Mickiewicz Institute, in cooperation with the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, presents Greenhouse Silent Disco at the 23rd Triennale Milano International Exhibition, co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
Following this year’s theme of “Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries,” the Polish Pavilion joins the expedition by going beyond preconceived ideas of plants as static and passive organisms. Greenhouse Silent Disco is a greenhouse of the future, filled with lush vegetation and equipped with digital sensors that capture the reactions of the plants to various stimuli, including the presence of the humans who pass through the installation and the changing of the weather outside. These reactions are transformed into LED lights and sounds.
Curators Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber and Michał Duda, creators of many exhibitions and publications dedicated to design and architecture, have blended a sensual, romantic and corporeal approach to nature with the possibilities of modern technology. At the heart of the project is research by plant physiologist Hazem Kalaji, professor in the department of Agriculture and Biology at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, and his #iPlant system.
Within the installation, plants communicate with the system through the excess light they receive that they do not use in photosynthesis, a phenomenon referred to as chlorophyll fluorescence. This makes it possible to determine their needs according to human-centric parameters that we can grasp and interpret.
“The greenhouse of the future is like a disco. The LED lights vary from blue to red and white depending on the plants’ needs. For example, they change color if it is cloudy or raining outside the greenhouse,” explains professor Hazem Kalaji, who curated and supervised the scientific aspect of the exposition.
The installation, designed by Barbara Nawrocka and Dominika Wilczyńska of the architecture firm Miastopracownia with graphic design by Nicola Cholewa in cooperation with Magdalena Heliasz, is a wooden structure inspired by natural fractals. The plants, kept in handmade artisanal terracotta pots, are multiplied into infinity by the reflective glass walls.
An intense and profound relationship develops between the visitors and the plants in a clear evocation of Romanticism, the philosophical and literary matrix of the project. In fact, the installation is being presented during the Year of Polish Romanticism, full of events celebrating the great poet and writer Adam Mickiewicz on the 200th anniversary of the publication of his “Ballads and Romances”.
“It is with Romanticism that nature transcends a purely illustrative role and becomes an instrument of knowledge. Man becomes part of Nature, and nature itself becomes a way to know the world,” says Duda, deputy director for programming at the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław. “The Romantics believed that only in nature could man truly be himself. So the starting point is to ask if we can draw on the wisdom of plants to inform our designs. And the answer is yes.”
Greenhouse Silent Disco is open now through December 11, 2022.
Photography by Paolo Riolzi.
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