Text excerpt about IZMP:

In often collaborative ways and collective processes, Lena Violetta Leitner explores connections between art and science, especially in the field of biology, but also language and society. In 2017, for example, she founded an Integrationcenter for Migrated Plants – abbreviated IZMP – in which she focuses with ironic subtlety on current global political escape and migration movements in the mirror of our behavior towards plants.

Based on facts that she mixes with speculative fabulation, Lena Violetta Leitner traces the (colonial) history(s) of so-called invasive alien plants and, in particular, Japanese knotweed with the help of the research center.

Invasive alien plants are plants that have arrived after 1492 as a result of human activity in regions where they were not previously found. Although originally deliberately imported to Europe in the 17th century, long held in high esteem and despite its usefulness of important binding of heavy metals in the soil, Japanese knotweed was classified as a problem plant a few years ago for economic reasons due to its rapid growth and high adaptability with which it displaces other plants, and subsequently combated. The classification as an undesirable migrant and the linguistic defamation as an invasive plant was misused for right-wing populist propaganda in Austria especially in 2015 in the course of increased global refugee movements. In a counter-movement, Leitner’s works therefore question how and why we classify plants as seemingly >foreign< or >native< and thus investigate exclusion and demarcation mechanisms.

Among other projects, she created the installation Sprachlabor (2017), in which the plants are exposed to German and behavioral courses, while the electronic
resistance value of their leaves is measured to study their ability to integrate into Austria. If resistance is persistently high, the plants are returned, while a low resistance value results in an integration pass. The laboratory-like installation is flanked by a lecture performance that addresses, among other things, our use of and relationship to inexpensive, exotic houseplants from the garden center, thus highlighting ambivalences between wanted and unwanted plant migrants.

Julia Katharina Thiemann
curator