The large windows of the former McDonald's at Berlin's Alexanderplatz are completely overgrown. A delicate chrome shelf divides them into an even grid, with translucent compartments in which it is restlessly bubbling. Some are filled with plants that are considered native in other parts of the world. Here and there compartments are laden with laboratory flasks or single packed cuttings.
In recent weeks and months, plant deliveries have arrived from many different places. Some have grown too big for the flat, others came from the premises of a company that is switching to home office, bankruptcy assets or had to make way for a hemp plantation - discarded plants are suddenly filling the gallery rooms of the nGbK.
Starting with the opening of the exhibition, a redistribution process is set in motion. Each plant is digitised on a mobile terminal that looks as if it would otherwise be surveying the jungles of Brandenburg. A scanning platform with houseplants rotates on six all-terrain wheels, observed stereoscopically by two suspicious cameras, before appearing on the large screen with a surprisingly pleasant gong. The plant now digitally inhabits another place where nutrients, light and dew never seem to be in short supply. Here, the plants willingly tell their stories, while their analogue counterparts are processed into cuttings at the lifting table. Cuttings are grown in transparent containers on a large, light-flooded shelf before being packaged in recycled laboratory flasks and distributed to exhibition visitors with a digital identifier. By scanning the QR code on the flask, they can now visit the mother plant, which lives on in a digital forest and keeps telling of its previous life, while the seedlings' propagation routes are carefully documented.
Website of the project: odf.p-a-r-a.org
