Botanical Memory Infrastructures: Provenance Beyond the Detective Paradigm and the Migratory Life of Specimens

Contemporary Provenienzforschung reconstructs ownership histories and movement, providing legal and moral accountability in Nazi-looted and colonial contexts. This panel broadens the field by foregrounding botanical objects whose trajectories are ecological, multi-sited, and ongoing. We approach provenance not as a closed evidentiary chain but as a dynamic process embedded in infrastructures of knowledge, classification, care, and memory. Focusing on Hanover’s botanical history, we trace specimens through transfers and subsequent digitization, whose “migratory archives” reveal tensions between institutional preservation, community-based knowledge, and informal collection. Through the botanical diaspora of Robinia pseudoacacia and Acacia confusa across provisional and situated histories, we consider “native/invasive” and “real/pseudo” as relational categories, asking how provenance research becomes an ongoing practice of negotiating memory.