The exhibition offers an insight into fruit growing as an intangible cultural heritage interwoven with historical objects, the cultural landscape, and human memories. It tells the story of the people who planted, grafted, pruned, and harvested the trees. It speaks of heirloom fruit varieties passed down from generation to generation, and of the labor that brought families, neighbors, and village communities together.

Curated by Barbara Sosič (SEM) and Miha Špiček (SEM), the exhibition creatively blends rich ethnographic material from the SEM collections with documentary-artistic photographs by film director, photographer, and recipient of the 2026 Prešeren Fund Award, Gregor Božič, from his series Fruits Dreamed of by Farmers in Winter Time. The exhibition design was created by Maja Kocjan.

It presents a thoughtful interplay of objects, historical photographs, and drawings depicting fruit-growing scenes and tools from the SEM collections—whose worn handles and ground blades bear witness to decades of painstaking orchard care. Alongside them come to life contemporary, poetic photographs of winter orchards, fruits, landscapes, and tree caretakers, which Gregor Božič captured across Slovenia, Belgium, France, and Italy.

Every Orchard Holds Memories
The exhibition does not merely depict the fruit tree as a source of food or income, but as a unifier of family stories and communities. In many places, tree planting accompanied key milestones in life, while ancient trees remain living witnesses to the generations who lived with them and tended them. In an era of agricultural intensification, the exhibition reminds us of the importance of preserving these vanishing fruit-growing traditions.
Year-round tasks—from spring pruning to winter trunk protection—dictated the rhythm of life and connected people. The exhibition thus invites us to reflect on whether we will preserve the orchards left to us by our ancestors, or whether their memory will only be kept alive in museums.

Gregor Božič: A Look into Winter Orchards
The exhibition's thematic scope is complemented by the extraordinary work of Gregor Božič (born 1984 in Nova Gorica), a film director, cinematographer, and artist. Alongside his film work, he has for many years been researching old fruit varieties that have almost disappeared from cultivation due to their lack of economic viability and the industrialisation of agriculture. In the Goriška region, and working together with local farmers, he has sought out and preserved numerous old varieties and planted a collection orchard. His work combines art, research, the preservation of cultural and natural heritage, and an interest in the knowledge and memories of people who have preserved traditional methods of growing fruit.

About Božič's Photographs
Following his survey exhibition Rêver debout (2024) at the French gallery MUba Eugène Leroy, Gregor Božič—recipient of the 2026 Prešeren Fund Award—presented an adapted installation of Fruits Dreamed of by Farmers in Winter Time (2025) at the Carinthian Gallery of Fine Arts in Slovenj Gradec (KGLU). The photography series was created between 2019 and 2021, when Božič visited fruit-growing regions in Belgium, France, Italy, and Slovenia, where traditional fruit growing still plays an important community and cultural role. He travelled in winter, when the fruit trees are dormant, and photographed the trees, the fruit, the places and the people who care for them. He was not merely interested in fruit as a natural object, but above all in the relationships among people, trees and places, and the knowledge passed down through the generations. His photographs thus speak of the landscape as a space shaped over centuries by human life and farming. Today, due to industrialization and the homogenization of agricultural production, this landscape is increasingly marked by uniform varieties, farming methods, and spatial identity.