What does your greenhouse cabinet mean to you?
@Cabinetcultures is a research project based at Queen Mary University of London.
I've handed this slot over to Giulia Carabelli and Matthew Beach from Queen Mary University to spread the word about their research project being launched at Queen Mary University of London: and they want to get you involved. Over to Giulia and Matthew to explain more...
The project is called “Cabinet Culture, cultivating aesthetic, ecological and heritage value in human-houseplant relations” and it aims to co-create and share research on Instagram and in an exhibition at The Garden Museum about the value of plants. You can follow the development of the project on Instagram via @cabinetcultures.
In the next three months, we will co-produce and disseminate research to reflect on how we can become more appreciative of the social and political values of houseplants, and plants in general, in the making of a more sustainable future.
The project’s team includes plant knowledge-makers Emma Angold aka @goodgrowing, a plant-content creator, The Garden Museum in London, which is dedicated to the history of gardening, and botanical illustrator Sarah Gardner. Together, we wish to explore how to change social and political attitudes towards houseplants.
The main output of this project is an exhibition, which will be hosted at the Garden Museum in June 2023. We aim to re-appropriate the recent trend of modified IKEA display cabinets doubling as small-scale greenhouses. This phenomenon offers a window into the core problematic of the project, insofar as human-plant relations take on a multitude of different (and contradictory) forms, rationales, and aesthetics.
While many plantfluencers on social media, as well as their audiences, care for their plants in ways that underscore notions of friendship and kinship, others working with/through plants view their nonhuman partners as merely object-commodities to be bought and sold on a booming international market. The economic and aesthetic consumption of a single display cabinet thus emerges as a space containing diverse potentialities for plant-human relationships.
Our exhibition seeks to capture this relationship between the general and the particular within plant culture(s), by utilising IKEA display cabinets that house a different plant genus, each of which explores the multiple values and modes of 'planting'. These include Scindapsus (aesthetic/monetary value), Bromeliaceae (ecological/use value), and Tradescantia (heritage/archival value), all very common houseplants.
The research is thought as participatory, and the Instagram page will allow for plant-enthusiasts to interact with the team as we disseminate the results of the research process.
Follow @cabinetcultures on Instagram to find out more.
This blogpost was taken from The Plant Ledger, my twice monthly email newsletter about the UK houseplant scene. Subscribe here and get my free in-depth guide to fungus gnats.