Aloi-Estado Vegetal-Introduction and Sample

2020

Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies, 2013

This essay analyses the plant-strewn pages of Brecht Evens' graphic novel art parody The Making Of (2012) from an intertextual point of view that pays special attention to the Pattern and Decoration movement and to the element of kitsch. As a way of investigating the use of plant-life in art, this analysis shows how plants and flowers, even (and perhaps especially) when abundantly present in an artwork can be effaced in their symbolic and biological capacity and instead come to function in a purely instrumental manner. In light of the overwhelming silence of plants as plants in the graphic novel, this text raises epistemological questions pertaining to the knowability of plants to humans.

MLN, 2022

Open Cultural Studies, 2024

This article explores different institutional approaches to exhibiting and maintaining living, plantbased sculptures, and installation art. By studying the creation and management of artworks by Gilberto Esparza, Michael Wang, Precious Okoyomon, and Daniel Lie, this article considers how cultural institutions can incorporate ethics of more-than-human care in their conservation practices. As each of these artworks grows, decays, and dies through differing states of institutional intervention (or lack thereof), their provocative experiments through the themes and aesthetics of queer ecology, vegetal technoscience, and botanical decolonization invite museum staff and visitors alike into biodynamic, multisensory engagements with multispecies collaboration that turn the white cube into soil and green.

The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions, 2018

The Wretched Earth Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions Guest Editors: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018) This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons. Full issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/current Introduction:

Rizoma: Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology, and Science, 2023

Short piece on Latin American cinema, plants, and the potential to imagine and reconfigure audiovisual narratives of extra-human modes of existence.

Australian artist Janet Laurence's BioArt deploys plants as a conceptual apparatus and her work is an example of growing scientific and artistic interest in the neuro-biology and communication capacities of plants. Her work engages with the relevance of plant life as a means of redressing the place of humanity in the world. Her work helps to shift the ontological significance of plants, as independent and agented beings, which subsequently changes their aesthetic value. This shift towards a more equalized register of being affects our cognition and perception of plants and plant-thinking. It also affects how the functions and adaptability of plant life can inform the way we live in, and consciously perceive, the world around us. Janet Laurence has a biocentric view of the world. Much of her work incorporates live biotic matter such as plant seedlings, tree branches, root systems and plant-related material such as seeds and soil. Her use (or re-use) of plant life in an art setting, often conducted as a " concept of care, " suggests the lively elements of nature. Her aesthetic interpretation of the physical benevolence of the earth is important for a revised understanding of the environment, as an energetic operative and as a system of information, rather than as an inert backdrop to human action. This paper constitutes a discussion of Laurence's repurposing of plants in her art. Her plant artworks are mobilised out of the fecund ground and into the gallery space and, as such, they address plants' ontological status and they engage with theories of the grounded geological earth. The eco-psychology of our global society (exhibiting symptoms of extinction fear and critical climate change concerns) and new discoveries in how plants operate, adapt, and sense all things inform this analysis of Janet Laurence's important plant-specific art work. Her art practice fits within the theoretical framework of the geo-philosophy of Jussi Parikka and his concept of the " Anthrobscene " which marks the abject results of mankind's impact on the earth's geological surface (The Anthrobscene); it also fits with Ben Woodard's interpretation of Schelling's " un-grounding of nature " philosophy (On an Ungrounded Earth) and, finally, it links with the " plant-thinking " concepts of philosopher Michael Marder (" For a Phytocentrism to Come " 237). It does this in part by acknowledging the problematic anthropocentric divide between human subject and natural object, through her creation of immersive, interactive and experiential installation encounters, in order to alleviate and diffuse a conventional and divisional dyad relationship. Laurence's interactive artworks draw attention to the marks humans have left on the earth's surface, through agriculture, mining, land-clearing and urban development. The artworks highlight the issue of how new discoveries in plant science show us that plants can smell, hear, think, learn, remember and communicate (Chamovitz). This information changes our perceptions of, and relationships with, plant life and with the surface of the earth and nature more broadly. ISSN 1444­3775

Leena Rouhiainen (ed.) Perilous Experience CARPA 5 Colloquium Proceedings. Nivel 09 2018 , 2018

The following text in four parts was the voice-over text of a video installation at CARPA 5. This text is part of a video installation based on material documenting my sitting in a tree in Stockholm at the end of the year 2016 and beginning of 2017. The video clips will serve as examples of my first attempts in a project called performing with plants. In this text, I will first refer to my plan and my notes while performing, then reference Michael Marder’s ideas regarding the so called hidden life of plants, then bring in the notion trans-corporeality suggested by Stacy Alaimo and finally say a few words of how my understanding of my practice has changed.

This paper explores the pervasive role of plants in the lives of the Jotï, a group of 900 people from the Venezuelan Guayana. In contrast with other Amazonian people for whom plants play relatively minor roles in spiritual spheres when compared to animals (e.g., the Ese Eje, Aguaruna or Yanomami), among the Jotï plants pervade their religious universe, assuming fundamental and polysemic dimensions. Plants constitute active agents in Jotï biological, cultural, and spiritual production and reproduction. Plants are prominent within all aspect of Jotï society making it difficult to establish strict separations between subsistence and ideological spheres. This question is explored here using a broad concept of Religion including four interrelated concerns: protology, anthropogony, ecogony and eschatology. Embedded in this text are three aspects: (1) the contemporaneity of phyto-myths in daily lives; (2) the centrality of plants in the fabrication of humanity; and, (3) the relationship of the phyto-world to what Amazonian scholars refer to as “the symbolic economy of alterity”.

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 2020