Next Generation: Unlearning botanical narratives with Nina Škerjanc

This story is part of Next Generation, a series in which we give young makers a platform to showcase their work. Your work here? Get in touch and plot your coordinates as we navigate our future together.

Nina is a Slovenian designer, artist and researcher based in the Netherlands. She received a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design at the University of Ljubljana, and later a master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag. Her practice is driven by a curiosity to unpack her position in the world as an individual, designer and human. By studying relationships between people and materials, beings and spaces, she questions the binary ways of knowing and thinking that have shaped our world, particularly by asking herself how could it be otherwise. As a designer, she wishes to craft not just objects but also ideas, by experimenting with research methodologies, materials and connecting with people from various backgrounds. She strives to work in-between the opposites of nature and culture, science and art by taking inspiration from both fields and trying to re-imagine them as a different whole.

This project started by asking myself, what is nature and how do I relate to this concept. I realized my idea of nature was influenced by the history and culture in which I live, by which the concept of nature was romanticized as untouched wilderness or scientifically objectified into separate parts. By trying to un-learn the way I was taught to look at nature, I turned to the institutions that represent and held the knowledge about nature- natural history museums and botanical gardens.

These established systems of botanical knowledge and representations maintain the nature/culture divide and influence our relationship with the world where nature is perceived as something separated from human and human actions.

While focusing on the human relationship with plants, I realized that these institutions play a key role in representing botanical knowledge, and by doing so, mediate our relationship with plants. Plants are categorized through scientific taxonomies and systems and are often presented as preserved and isolated specimens in pots or herbarium sheets. These established systems of botanical knowledge and representations maintain the nature/culture divide and influence our relationship with the world where nature is perceived as something separated from human and human actions.

How can we imagine different ways of knowing and being with plants? How can we re-imagine natural heritage as a learning tool for a more symbiotic future?

In order to challenge the dominant botanical knowledges and representations, I wanted to create a space that would enable other ways of knowing plants, based on situated and embodied views. I wanted to bring together human and non-human communities and I wanted to co-create an alternative botanical heritage based on imagination, storytelling, and experiences. By questioning not just the systems but also the methods by which knowledge is created, I hope to shift away from paradigms of human exceptionalism and build practices that encourage reflection, empathy, and care towards our environment. How can we imagine different ways of knowing and being with plants? How can we re-imagine natural heritage as a learning tool for a more symbiotic future?

To be able to situate ourselves in the world anew, we first need to become an active part of it by thinking with other actors in our environment and engaging in dialogues. That is why I built a Wardian cart; a traveling research station that brings together people and practices that center on plants and their relations to their local environments. The cart, based on the colonial botanical artifact is a tool for sharing, creating, and collecting knowledge about our local environment through “wrong” ways of learning. The cart was traveling around the city of den Haag to the spaces where a certain plant or an actor resides and interacts with other beings in their environment. By encountering the plant in its environment the knowledge creation possibly becomes an embodied co-creation between the plant and the human. By using the cart for the series of workshops, I focused on using methodologies based on stories, experiences, and imaginaries, which would encourage the participants to further observe, negotiate and reflect on their relationship with the certain plant.

By facilitating the workshop I tried to create a space where the participant could get to know the plant as a being with agency and acknowledge that any human action is intentionally or unintentionally entangled with other non-human matters.

The first series of workshops were called the “Cattail Gatherings” where we learned from the weeds called Cattails and tried to unpack our relationship through history. In this gathering, we tried to imagine different ways of relating and knowing about plants that go beyond the dualistic understanding of nature and culture. Instead of classifying and ordering plants through the eyes of botanists, what are other ways of looking at plants? By facilitating the workshop I tried to create a space where the participant could get to know the plant as a being with agency and acknowledge that any human action is intentionally or unintentionally entangled with other non-human matters. All the experiments, experiences, and reflections were later shared on the Wardian's cart digital archive called "Imaginarium", an alternative herbarium based not just on scientific ways of looking at plants, but rather a collection of various views that together try to re-frame the concept of natural heritage through stories rather than specimens.