IPSD - Susanne Schmitt: Of Water Gardens and Glowing Traces. How to shift a former
nail salon that belongs to a cemetery into a botanical garden for a week
International Programmes in Sustainable Developments
(Work)places
have their own choreographies of touch, their own politics of hapticality and storied memories of tactile encounters. Susanne
Schmitt's talk follows the traces of a translation/creation process between two such sites: the Botanical Gardens Berlin and
a former nail salon that has been transformed into a community space for the urban gardening collective Prinzessinnengärten
in Berlin. In November, the "Studio Nagelneu" hosts an installation that emerged out of an artistic/ethnographic collaboration
with the research project "Touching Plants" (Freie Universität Berlin) exploring ecounters between plants and humans. The
talk revisits the collaboration process through the lens of hapticality as a social practice and shares vignettes from the
installation site in order to further explore different aspects of touch.
Susanne
Schmitt is an anthropologist and sensory ethnographer, interdisciplinary artist, and facilitator. Her work focusses
on creative collaborations within and beyond the label of "art meets science", multispecies worlds, and the aesthetic dimensions
of the workplace and sites of knowledge production like natural history museums, aquariums, or botanical gardens.www.susanneschmitt.orgipsd.uni-ak.ac.at 
