The Museum of Contemporary Art fo the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, organises a series of encounters that offer different visions on the futures of the museum and its social responsability with regard to the safeguard of heritage and knowledge production.

Michael Marder: Notes for a vegetal museum

In this talk, I invite audience members to imagine what I call vegetal museum as a possible dynamic form of the institution’s future existence. By vegetal museum, I mean neither the contents of a collection nor the architectural and material configuration of museum buildings nor, even, the relation between these buildings and the garden (among other vegetal environments). Rather, I propose to bring the goals, modes of relating to time, as well as social and political relations that define the museum in line with the being of plants. What could the collection—both the process of collecting and the collected works themselves—look like in a museum that grows, decays, and metamorphoses like a plant? How would the ideal of conservation mutate in such an institution? What could be the sense of exhibitions, or displays, in light of the plants' tendency to maximize the exposure of their aboveground organs, while keeping the roots in the dark and moist reserves of the soil? These are but the initial questions, which will guide us through the process of vegetalizing the future of the museum.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013); Phenomena—Critique—Logos (2014); The Philosopher’s Plant (2014); Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020); Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel's Energy (2021); Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), and The Phoenix Complex (2023), among others. For more information, consult his website michaelmarder.org.

Michael Marder: Notes for a vegetal museum
6 June, Tuesday, 6.30 pm
Free entrance