Felipe Castelblanco. Borrachero Dreaming and the Quantum Plant, 2025

The Among Plants (Unter Pflanzen) exhibition is on-view at the Museum Sinclair-Haus in Bad Homburg / Frankfurt from March 16–August 17, 2025 marking the final phase of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant research projectat the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the HGK Basel led by the project’s principal investigator and exhibition’s co-curator Yvonne Volkart.

The exhibition invites you to slow down. To listen. To encounter plants. How often do we walk past them without giving them a second glance? How rarely do we remember that our breath, food and clothing connect us to them? We are constantly among plants - let's get to know our neighbours. Let's develop a sense for plants. The artists in the exhibition curated by Kathrin Meyer and Yvonne Volkart with Moritz Ohlig and Sophie Olivotto show plants as living, perceptive beings that enter into countless connections.  

Among Plants is the outcome of collaboration between the Museum Sinclair-Haus and the research project Plants_Intelligence. The exhibition marks the debut of three new artworks by Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits created as part of the project. Furthermore, it features two new works from project partners Ursula Damm and Ayênan Quinchoa Juajibioy.

The new artworks by Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are going to be exhibited at the upcoming RIXC Art Science Festival 2025, Riga, Latvia, October 16–November 23, 2025

Plants_Intelligence

Current research shows that plants are more complex beings than previously assumed. With reference to this, the SNSF research project of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the HGK Basel FHNW, “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant”, negotiates the discourse of plant intelligence in the natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts. It explores the conceptualization of intelligence and its intertwining with concepts such as mind, consciousness, communication, memory, decision making, problem solving, learning, subjectivity. It asks whether this conceptualization makes sense of the behaviors of vegetal life and whether it promotes new perspectives on interspecies and terrestrial relationships.

The project resulted in artworks by artists Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits on-view at the exhibition.
https://plants-intelligence.ch/about/

Felipe Castelblanco. Borrachero Dreaming and the Quantum Plant, 2025

Transported by the Brugmansia plant, an Indigenous man drifts between vision and reality, carrying the Kamëntšá people’s wisdom where time collapses and the future is felt, not seen. The Borrachero Dreaming and the Quantum Plant artwork by Felipe Castelblanco follows the unintended journey of an indigenous man who is suddenly transported from Putumayo, Colombia to the Swiss Alps and nearby urban landscapes after having come in contact with a Brugmansia plant. Caught up somewhere between visions and a quantum jump into a far away place and time, the story of the Borrachero Andaki begins to unravel as the traveler awakens the boundary-breaking powers of a plant that allows connection with vegetal beings and conflates memory, past and present. The film touches on the ethnomedicinal practices of the Kamnësnta people living in the Colombian-Amazon region, who still maintain a close relation to a potent plant from the Burgmansia family. Locally known as Borrachero Andaki, the toxicity of this plant has rendered it as a deadly and divine being at once. Ingesting -or even smelling it- can cause severe hallucinations and temporary loss of memory. Nevertheless, this plant is revered among the shamans for enabling those who take it to anticipate the future, not through visions but through feeling. 

Julia Mensch. Amaranth as a political agent, 2025.

Amaranth as a political agent by Julia Mensch allows to observe plants' behavior in situ closely. In light of drawing's long and complicated history in botany and colonial sciences, Colonizers and European botanists used the botanic illustration to catalogue the exotic realm of vegetation they encountered in, for example, the American Continent after the Spanish Conquest. Artist Julia Mensch uses the medium field drawings in a different direction: not to catalogue weeds or "illustrate" their vegetal and aesthetic characteristics but as a method to slow down observation time. Drawing is understood here to be a way of thinking, which by slowing time, the person drawing must slow down, trace singularities, and sharpen their senses of attention and observation without the need for technological devices. The artist wants to become slow: to further develop senses of perception that enable her to understand the realm of vegetation—but also weeds' historical and political characteristics. Drawing is also a method of taking visual notes about amaranth growth behaviour, allowing her to create connections between amaranth and other resistant weeds' vegetal and political characteristics. 

In the frame of the implementation of transgenic agriculture in Argentina since 1996, amaranth was the first wild plant to develop resistance to agrochemicals, growing in GM fields. Amaranth is a plant native to the Americas: its seeds were preserved by indigenous peoples, despite the Spanish colonizers’ prohibition, and today it is the most wide-spread glyphosate-resistant weed.

Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Solarceptors, 2025.

Solarceptors by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits explores "plant intelligence" by addressing the mystery of the evolution of flowers and the rapid emergence of diverse species more than 100 million years ago. The work is part of a three-year research project, "Plants Intelligence", in which artists collaborated with scientists and researchers from Switzerland to create a virtual reality experience based on an artistic vision of flowers as metaphorical "eyes" that follow the sun, synchronising the plant's circadian rhythms with the cycles of the planets. The virtual environment uses plants from artists' experiments with lupins, collecting data on the growth process, environmental effects and light perception.

Among Plants exhibition

"We spend much of our time “among plants,” yet we seldom are consciously aware of them and understand little about their capabilities", says Kathrin Meyer, curator of Unter Pflanzen (Among Plants), inviting us to slow down, listen and get to know our phytogenetic neighbours anew - as sentient, networked living beings. 

The exhibition takes place at the Sinclair-Haus Museum of Art and Nature, Bad Homburg / Frankfurt, Germany, where since 1982 interdisciplinary exhibitions and events have been curated that explore the possibilities of perceiving, understanding and reflecting on nature through the prism of art. In this way, the museum illuminates the relationship between nature, culture and science, opening up new perspectives on their interaction.

The exhibition "Among Plants" is one of the main exhibitions of the Museum this year, with almost 1 000 visitors at the public opening on 16 March, proving the relevance of the plant theme. The curators point out that since the early 2000s, there has also been a growing interest in plants as permanent, active beings in the arts and humanities. Plants make life on earth possible in its present form. They meet basic human needs in a variety of ways, providing for example air to breathe, food to eat and raw materials for clothing. The work of the artists in the exhibition encourages us to perceive plants with all our senses and to appreciate their individual forms, abilities and the ways in which they inhabit the world.

In "Among Plants", invited artists explore how plants have shaped human culture for centuries, both in Europe and in indigenous South American communities, while others create plant-human hybrids, exploring the closeness between humans and plants.

The exhibition artists: Felipe Castelblanco, Ursula Damm, Thorben Danke, Maya Deren & Tally Beatty, Mary Delany, Wim van Egmond, Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger, Eduardo Kac, Kahn & Selesnick, Ernst Kreidolf, Debora Lombardi, Jesse McLean, Julia Mensch, Max Reichmann, Mathilde Rosier, Omi-peah Ryding und Roman Schramm, Scenocosme, Ann Shelton, Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmit, Kiki Smith, Una Szeemann, Ayênan Quinchoa Juajibioy, Lois Weinberger.

The exhibition "Among Plants" will be on view until August 17, 2025 at the Sinclair-Haus Museum of Art and Nature, Bad Homburg, Germany. 

More information:
https://kunst-und-natur.de/museum-sinclair-haus/ausstellungen/pflanzen

Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), within the project "Plants Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant, 2022-2025 at FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel, Switzerland.