Abstract

In the article, I discuss the role of plants in Karolina Grzywnowicz’s Grün | Zielony [Green] project and point to their media nature as well as their inseparable connection with the local cultural history and bottom-up practices of memory of the residents of Breslau/ Wrocław. I look at the cultural biography of Wrocław plants from the perspective of cultural and environmental anthropology and analyse the various ways in which they co-create and sustain – due to their material belonging to a specific space and cyclic, heterotemporal rhythms of growing and dying back – the transcultural identity of the city, entering into the relationship both with the everyday experiences of the residents of Wrocław and with the historically changing, social relations of power. In this context, I also discuss the concept of “personal natural monuments” introduced by the artist and I reflect on its accuracy.