Welcome to Roots Unnamed — an art event with a mini-exhibition, performance, and conversation at The Röhsska Museum’s gazebo in the Gothenburg Botanical Garden.
Roots Unnamed is an art event held at the Röhsska Museum’s 18th-century pavilion, surrounded by an herb garden that once gathered plants from around the world. Over the course of an afternoon, art and storytelling intertwine around themes of loss, migration, and belonging- among people, museum objects, and the plants of Botanical Gardens.
Through the open expression and boundless imagination that art can bring to us, we revisit the journey of a lion sculpture from Thorild Wulff’s expedition to China, Carl Linnaeus’s sleepwalking in a garden where he loses his grip on classification and system of nameing, and a restless family ghost haunting the Swedish Museum of Natural History in its attempt to restore a lost name to a fish swimming between times and realms.
Through performance, video works, conversations, and a walk through the herb garden, the audience is invited to explore the question: What happens when museum objects, plants, and people all emerge as displaced, rootless and yet deeply connected?
Programme
12:30–13:00 – Viewing of the mini-exhibition in the Örtagården
12:40–12:50 – Introduction to the program in the Örtagården
13:00–13:20 – Performance and lion dance by Yiten Lai and Anne Sveberg
Accompanied by live music on the guzheng – the Chinese string instrument whose tones carry the echo of memory, visitors are invited into a poetic and slightly eerie lion dance. In this shamanic space-time, a sealed, mythological creature is brought to life. This creature, once forced to leave its homeland, had its body divided to fit into Thorild Wulff’s curio boxes, and was shipped to Gothenburg by boat.
13:20–13:30 – The audience follows the lion dancer to Galleri Floras Rike
13:30–13:40 – Break with snacks & preparation for Linnea’s presentation at Galleri Floras Rike
13:40–14:20 – Linnea’s presentation: “Chrysichthys johnelsi – the apparatus of naming”
Artist Linnea Johnels explores the colonial legacy surrounding the naming of the fish Chrysichthys johnelsi, a species her grandfather Alf Johnels “discovered” during a Swedish expedition to Gambia in the 1950s. Through her artistic research, she reflects on Sweden’s role in the infrastructures and ambitions that enabled the scientific expeditions where the species was first described.
14:20–15:20 – Conversation between Linnea and Yiten Lai, moderated by Sixten Liu at Galleri Floras Rike
Artist
Yi Ten Lai Fernández is an artist currently based in Copenhagen. In her work, she examines the sensations of national and cultural belonging through the lens of traditional crafts and rituals. Rooted in her Andalusian and Hongkonese heritage, she explores the complexities of Orientalism, engaging with themes of identity fluidity and cultural questioning and creating a third space between East and West.
Linnea Johnels studied at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Södertörn University, and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her artistic practice is distinctly research-based and often materialises in installations or text works. She investigates Western knowledge production and the colonial logic embedded in the scientific ways of understanding and relating to the world, as well as the tools, languages, and institutions that sustain this logic.
Before your visit
Drop in. Free admission.
