Skip to main content

ErbUndGut: The supermarket in Natural History Museum

The supermarket in Natural History Museum starts from 7 March onwards for three months, opening on 7.3. at 16.30h.

A temporary supermarket opens in the experimental field of the Museum für Naturkunde. It invites visitors to the museum to look behind the facades of the manufacturing process of products that we encounter there: after all, you can't see the apples, milk or tomato as they were made. For many years, growers have been interfering with the genetic make-up of crops. Recently, methods of genome meditation have promised to make precise, rapid, inexpensive and thus momentous changes.  The ErbUndgut supermarket is a place that tells stories based on selected supermarket products and makes them tangible. After all, plant breeding has many facets. We present five of them on supermarket shelves. Using wheat, tomatoes, milk, apples and potatoes, we take a look at the history of breeding, at different levels of intervention, questions of labelling or variety diversity. In addition, various listening stations have been installed and an interactive possibility for participants has been integrated, inviting them to intervene "in the breeding process" themselves. The sound art works of the artists Kathrin Hunze, Alberto de Campo and Thomas Hermann were created in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk Kultur and the projects PLANT 2030 and ELSA-GEA. The supermarket is part of the GenomElection research project sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and is also financially supported by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.

Questions of breeding do not only have scientific and legal consequences. After all, we may encounter the application of methods exactly where the visitor stands are: In the supermarket.

Opening hours: daily from 2:00 - 6:00 p.m.  (except Mondays)

More information on the research project please click here