A Story of Architecture, Nature, and National Socialist Colonialism
It’s time for another special exhibition! We are pleased to invite you to the opening of Plantstoria: A Story of Architecture, Nature, and National Socialist Colonialism. After being shown in three Polish cities, it’s now high time to present it to the people of Berlin as well. This is anything but an ordinary exhibition—just as diverse as its title suggests, and it certainly lives up to it!
Conceived by Exercising Modernity alumna and scholarship holder Barbara Nawrocka, the exhibition also serves as a small tribute to our Exercising Modernity program, now in its sixth year.
Date: Thursday, 30 October, 7 PM
Venue: Pilecki Institute Berlin, Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin
Registration: https://forms.gle/JfQzhSmZ7DTm9xjd9
The exhibition explores the history of a residential district in the Polish city of Ciechanów, built during the German occupation in the Second World War. Similar housing districts, colloquially referred to as Berlinki or poniemieckie (“formerly German”), can still be found in many Polish towns today. The exhibition’s curator and architect, Barbara Nawrocka, examines this architectural legacy through the lens of nature and landscape, revealing how plant life, history, politics, and collective memory intertwine.
The district was conceived in the early 1940s as a so-called “garden suburb” — a housing estate for German officials and their families in the capital of the newly created Regierungsbezirk Zichenau. The concept drew on the utopian and originally progressive ideals of the Garden City movement initiated by British social reformer Ebenezer Howard, but here it was transformed into an instrument of National Socialist colonization and propaganda.
Nawrocka weaves an eclectic, multidimensional narrative: reflections on the contradictory, simultaneously modernist and reactionary nature of National Socialism are interlaced with ideas reminiscent of Bruno Latour. In doing so, she symbolically gives plants a voice and perspective of their own.
Following its presentations in Gdynia, Ciechanów, and Wrocław—where it was shown at the Museum of Architecture, Poland’s only museum dedicated to architecture—Plantstoria received widespread acclaim. Architecture magazines such as Architektura Murator and Architecture Snob described it as one of the most striking projects of the past season. We are therefore particularly pleased to now present it to the Berlin audience.
Plantstoria was realized by the Pilecki Institute Berlin as part of the program Exercising Modernity – Ćwiczenie Nowoczesności.