About the Seminar:

Plants and seeds are organic storages of memory, tradition and belonging. Throughout history, their expansion has carried very different meanings. Colonial powers forcibly misappropriated and relocated countless green goods for profit and power. By contrast, as part of migration culture, plants have been imported and cultivated into new living places, carrying deep practical and emotional values for their communities. Organisms are vivid cultural monuments: As living connections to a homeland left behind, they carry the scent, taste and touch of another place – promising nostalgic ways of participation through their presence, care and usage. Botanical kin, therefore, forms a currency of belonging (rooting) and intergrowth (dispersal, symbiosis, prosperity). Vegetation is a free-willed force: Liberated from social constructs such as national

borders or cultural attributions, the natural impulse reclaims abandoned buildings and shapes their surroundings, turning into a symbol of resilience, adaptability and continuity. For example, the palm trees of Los Angeles shape the cities’ appearance – even though their broad settlement is an artificial orchestration to brand the southern desert metropole. Objectified into visual narratives of a tropical paradise, they cease to be plants and become part of the infrastructure, or simply a vertical line (Wüste, 2025). But how does botany itself connect to ideas of nationality, borders or belonging?

Natural organisms spread beyond maps, national borders, properties and fences, shaping alliances with insects, wind and soil. Opposing the horizontal boundaries of society, natural hierarchies distribute considerably on the y-axis. In tropical rainforests like the Amazonas, ecosystems organizes itself vertically into distinct layers stacked in height: from the shaded forest floor to the dense understory, the sunlit canopy above it and, reaching highest, the emergent crowns that break into the open sky. Each of these strata hosts its own microclimate and community of organisms, forming acclimated niches in light, moisture and spaciousness (National Geographic Society, 2025). Likewise, the anatomy of most plants rises vertically – from the dark soil and mycelium to the roots, stem, leaves, blossoms, air and sunlight, composing living columns built along the dimensions of height. How can we redefine the taxonomy of green matter, and how do we project these categories onto human lives: as useful or invasive, cultivated or wild, desired or excluded? What are the relations of plants and communities towards their definitions of kinship and belonging? The seminar combines the interdisciplinary practices of design, anthropology and architecture to investigate and critically question the constructs of territory through the lense of our natural surroundings: infrastructures of roots and movement, traditions and growth, borders and flourishing ecosystems.