Ein Projekt im Rahmen von »Fellow Travellers«
26.07.2025 – 01.02.2026
ZKM | Karlsruhe
Als Christoph Kolumbus 1492 von seiner Reise in die „Neue Welt“ zurückkehrte, brachte er zahlreiche Pflanzen mit nach Europa – darunter Mais, Tomaten und Kartoffeln. Pflanzen, die seit dieser Zeit aus anderen Regionen der Welt bei uns eingeführt wurden, bezeichnet man als Neophyten – „neue Pflanzen“.
Zunächst handelte es sich vor allem um Nutzpflanzen, die im Zuge der Kolonialisierung gezielt verbreitet wurden, um sie weltweit gewinnbringend anzubauen. Später kamen Zierpflanzen hinzu, die von Forschern und sogenannten Pflanzenjäger:innen gesammelt und importiert wurden, meist auf Grund ihrer Schönheit oder Exotik. In unseren Gärten erzählen Beispiele wie Rhododendron, Kirschlorbeer oder Bambus nicht nur von globaler Pflanzenmigration, sondern spiegeln auch modische Strömungen und Ideale unterschiedlicher Epochen der Gartengestaltung wider. Und sie erzählen mitunter von den ökologischen Problemen, die Neophyten im Zeitalter des Klimawandels und globalisierten Warenverkehrs mit sich bringen. Man nennt sie dann invasive Arten.
Mit der Reise über die Kontinente haben viele Pflanzen auch ihre Namen verloren – sie wurden durch ihre sogenannten Entdecker:innen im Westen neu benannt. Die Kamelie etwa, eine Pflanze aus der Teefamilie, wird in Asien seit Jahrtausenden als Cha oder Chai bezeichnet. Im 18. Jahrhundert jedoch erhielt sie in Europa den Namen „Camellia“ – benannt durch den schwedischen Naturforscher Carl von Linné zu Ehren des Jesuitenpaters Georg Joseph Kamel. In kulturhistorischer Perspektive zeigt sich so die Geschichte der Neophyten nicht nur als transkontinentale Geschichte botanischer Migration, ihr ist zugleich auch die Kolonialgeschichte unaufhebbar eingeschrieben – als Akte symbolischer Gewalt der Aneignung des Fremden.
Phyto-Travellers, das für ZKM | Kubus Subraum neu konzipierte Projekt der in Paris und Karlsruhe lebenden Künstlerin Eva-Maria Lopez, stellt diesen Aspekt der kulturellen Aneignung und Domestizierung von Pflanzen aus anderen Weltregionen und Kulturkreisen in den Mittelpunkt. Lopez‘ Installation besteht aus jenen zugereisten und neu benannten Zierpflanzen, die inzwischen so tief in unseren Gärten verwurzelt sind, dass sie meist als einheimisch wahrgenommen werden und das vertraute Landschaftsbild wie selbstverständlich mitprägen. Die Künstlerin reproduziert mit ihrer Arbeit im Maßstab 2:3 die Grundform der „Niña“ – eines der beiden Schiffe aus Kolumbus‘ Flotte, die die ersten „neuen Pflanzen“ nach Europa mitbrachten. Aufgesockelt auf Transportpaletten entsteht so ein Innenraumgarten aus Neophyten, der das botanische Erbe einer globalisierten Pflanzenwelt aufruft, während auf der Glasfassade des Kubus die ursprünglichen, indigenen Bezeichnungen der Pflanzen genannt werden. Phyto-Travellers wird so zu einem lebendigen Archiv, dass die enge Verwobenheit von Natur- und Kolonialgeschichte mit erzählerischer Geste zur Darstellung bringt.
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Every plant has a story. It is an underrated medium in our world. People are plant-blind because what they see is just too much for them. They perceive it, but only as complete
green. It came about through a work on ballast
plants in Norway Ballast plants are plants that have been
transported to their home countries via the ballast of sailing ships- which
was mostly earth- and they have been spread there, so to speak,
unintentionally. This gave me the idea of developing a
work about the arrival of plants- about Christopher Columbus, who was the first to bring
plants or seeds from America to Europe, to the old
world, so to speak. But with an intention, i.e. with a
further spread. And that is the starting point for the
term neophytes. Neophytes are simply called new, i.e.
Neo. And phytes means plants. And all other
plants we would now call native plants or
indigenous. And you shouldn’t necessarily equate it
with invasive. This is often confused. Neophytes simply mean new plants, but not
all neophytes are invasive. Many people are simply no longer aware of
it today. The potato can already be seen as a
quintessentially German vegetable, so to speak. What also fascinated me was the ship,
that it wasn’t that big. The replica here is two to three. And whatever a starting point it was for colonization, for global trade. Because the whole colonial history is
actually also related to plants. There are no crops here, but ornamental
plants. This is then more likely to be
overlooked, because the other is clearly an economic good, but ornamental plants are
also an economic asset. That they only hunted the plants based on
their appearance and wanted to make a profit in
the old world. Colonization, for example, depended on
cotton. Cotton was an important product to make
clothes. For example, she was not native to the
USA. Or tea was illegally smuggled from Japan to Java or from China to India. And as a result, the English were
suddenly able to produce tea themselves. Or the Dutch, because they were important
trade goods. Rubber was also an important commodity or
still is. It was important to have our own rubber
plantations in order to be able to produce car tires. So our economic development depends very
much on the plants and that is always forgotten because when someone
looks at a car tire today, they don’t think of rubber plantations. Of course, there were also wars over
plants. For example, an island in Indonesia was
also exterminated to get nutmeg trees. So that has very serious consequences. And all the slave transports to South
America or North America are also related to plantations,
that you just grew something. Coffee, cotton, bananas or sugar cane. This dependence still exists today. And then it was also important for me,
how do I implement it? And nowadays, Euro pallets are the means
of transport. So on cargo ships, in containers And that was the turning point for me to say: “Okay, I’ll bring this to the Anthropocene level, that it has an implementation that fits today.” So the concept is that the pallet base,
two to three. is a replica of the Ninja, the boat with
which Columbus came back and pallets are today’s means of
transport. To recreate the shape, I took the pots from the plants to give an impression of the ship’s shape. And I chose the plants according to
different criteria, on the one hand, that they grow here in the cube and
on the other hand according to different epochs in horticulture, for
example the rhododendron was a fashionable plant, in
the 60s, 70s. Some are really very atypical plants,
such as the evergreen magnolia. You don’t see them that often here, for
example. Magnolia is also a plant that has lost
its name and was named after Monsieur Magnol, the
French botanist and through which ‘ia’ also has this
feminine. Magnolia. So with the transport from the native
countries, they have of course also lost their
original use, so to speak, i.e. a medical or
recreational meaning, but also their native name. Most of the time they were renamed and
quite often they were renamed after people and
98% actually after men. If they have been named after people. And with the native names, of course, the
meaning has also been lost. The lettering on the outside is again a return to the original name. And for my understanding, it’s funny that
they didn’t leave the native names, such as the hosta, which is called
giboshi, in Japanese. For me as a botanist, it was always
clear: the names like Hoststa or Magnolia are named
after men. So Monsieur Magnol: Magnolia, Mister
Forsythe: Forsythia and because of the ‘ia’ of the
‘a’ at the end or in German ‘ie’ Funkie, it has
something feminine, but as I said, 98% are actually of male
origin. So here you can see a plant called
‘Tradescantia’, it’s named after the English botanist
Tradescant and I also included it, because the German name is
three-master plant and of course that fits the boat,
because the boat was also a three-master. So there are such bon mots, some of which
I have included in it. Another plant that is very significant
for the naming here is the hosta, a
blue-leaved one. So it’s called Hosta, in German it’s
called Funkie, so Hosta is the name, Funkia is the genus
and there is a type of Hosta, which is also called
‘Sieboldiana’ and then we have three botanists: Funk was a
German botanist who never had anything to do with the plant,
which is called Giboshi in Japanese. Hosta Mr. Host, an Austrian botanist. Siebold was a botanist who illegally exported tea plants or seedlings: To Java to a Dutch colony, where tea was then planted very successfully. And then there is also tea plant or to
the tea plant family, the Kamelia and Mr. Kamel
is the namesake, a Jesuit priest and that’s
why the plant is called Kamelia, because Carl von Linnaeus wanted to honor him. So most of the time, naming after people
was about honoring them, that a plant was named
after them. And some botanists have never named
plants after themselves, for example, Sibylla
von Merian did not name a plant after
herself. That was also a moment for me to
integrate what is behind it into the work. A work has also emerged from it. ‘The gentlemen in my garden’, where I
pull out all those that are named after men, because after
botanists- there are almost no women’s names that
have been immortalized. And with the writings, it’s again a
matter of giving back or questioning: Why was it actually
renamed? Why isn’t it renamed back? Because DNA analyses have caused plant
names to be changed again and again. But in the sense of giving back, that
doesn’t happen. I think that would be a good idea. If you are already flexible to rename the
plants in other directions, why not give back the name they actually have? That was also an imposition of Western thinking or Western dominance over the
plants, This is a forsythia, in Chinese Lian Qiao
and this is one of the 50 fundamental
medicinal plants in China. And it blooms yellow in spring. And these flowers and also the seeds are
an important remedy against inflammation and with us it is
actually only planted because of the flower, because it is one
of the first flowering shrubs, and hardly anyone knows that you
could dry the flowers as tea, for example. Here is one of the oldest plants ever:
ginkgo from China and is also one of the few plants
that have kept its name. Ginkgo Biloba It is also called the tree of life or the
tree of luck. It already existed in dinosaur times and
you can also see it in the leaf veins that it is
structured completely differently than a different leaf now. This is a fossil plant. Neophytes are not equally invasive, and
especially in the course of climate change, we are
dependent on foreign species or migration of plants,
because some of our species do not survive this
adaptation to the changes. And I had also talked to the nursery, it
is very clear that we cannot avoid having foreign
species and foreign species are not bad or
invasive per se. You should just keep in mind that many
species, because they have been imported, without
their typical biosphere, i.e. without insects
and butterflies, beetles, that they do not
provide a basis for these animals and that you then
have to choose in a balanced way. What do I plant in the city now? If I only have planters, then the
biodiversity in this street is lower than if I do a mixed
planting. This is a cobbler’s palm from Japan that
can be used to wrap food, for example. This was one of the first ornamental
plants in Europe to hold out even in low light
conditions. Rododendron is very common here in Germany or in Europe and is a garden plant in our country, but an invasive species in Scotland and England. The invasive nature of neophytes always
depends on the climatic conditions. Rododendron can of course be found in the
Alps, but as a different form, i.e. rather small in
stature, also called azalea or alpine rose and
therefore, because they already existed, the name was used
there, which was already common in Europe. Rododendron from the Greek. It has been relatively new for a few
years now here in Europe or in Germany. Lucky Bamboo, Nadina, and Nanten Zoku, from Japan. It is now also legally the case that you can’t just make a neophyte hedge. With one with a neophyte like the Thuja, but that you just plant different plants alternately as a hedge. So legislation or society has also
evolved in the meantime. When I talk about migration, most people
actually only think that you are talking about people and not
about plants. And I actually think it’s quite nice that
it has such an ambiguity and that people interpret it
differently when I say it’s about the migration of
plants. Of course, the boat also stands for
migration, including of refugees, and is the most important
means of transport for goods. So there is a lot that goes into it.
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