Historical and contemporary views on the garden (part 1) – Lectures at Nationalmuseum

27 April 2023

Welcome ta on an evening with lectures in collaboration with Nationalmuseum!
Place: Nationalmuseum, Södra ljusgården, entrance floor
Thursday 27t of April 18.00–19.00

In 2023, the National Museum and the art gallery Färgfabriken will both open an exhibition on the theme “garden” It is therefore natural to collaborate and offer our visitors an opportunity to experience the garden in art from both a historical and contemporary perspective. The collaboration will begin in spring 2023 with a lecture evening at Nationalmuseum. Participating are Nico Carpentier, professor at the Department of Communication Studies and Journalism at Charles University in Prague, and Martin Olin, head of research at the Nationalmuseum. More events will be added in 2023.

About the lectures

Grazing animals – biodiversity or beauty?
Martin Olin

For thousands of years, humankind’s grazing livestock has left its marks on the landscape. The ecological impact of large-scale grazing includes threats to flora and fauna, soil erosion and climate change. However, people also appreciate the effects of traditional animal husbandry on nature; the desire to protect meadows and pastureland is largely aesthetically motivated. Grazed landscapes and gardens are actually categories that have merged over a long period of time and can be traced through art history.

Power and Gardens – A reflection on the taming of nature
Nico Carpentier

Gardens offer good starting points for a reflection about human-nature relationships. Driven by a discursive-material analysis, the talk is a reflection on how gardens are locations where nature is tamed, and how they often perform an anthropocentric ideology that is strengthened by a series of other discourses, such as capitalism and colonialism. These discourses are entangled with a series of material gardening practices where nature is used as a sculpting element, where the threat of the wilderness is removed, where exotic nature becomes an object of display, where humans organize commemoration and entertainment, and where biotic life is created.

Bild: Elias Martin, Engelskt landskap från Mistley Hall, Essex, 1772. Olja på duk. Nationalmuseum.