Exhibiting Plants: Curating the Gaze on Vegetal Beings (original) (raw)

Why Look at Plants? - Introduction.pdf

Why Look at Plants? , 2019

"Plant fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. This book argues that the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise our relationship with plants at a time of deep ecological crisis. 'Why Look at Plants?' challenges readers’ pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies". https://brill.com/view/title/33086

Why Look at Plants? - Brief (Encounters)

Why look at Plants, 2018

A chapter from 'Why look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art', focuses on plants in contemporary art, the power relations established in the gallery space, and the representational pitfalls that these might entail.

Standing in the shadows of plants

Plants People Planet, 2019

This special issue of Plants, People, Planet brings together a wide range of perspectives on the topic of “plant blindness”—the widest to date in one issue—with contributions from scholars working across a diverse range of disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences to plant science, conservation, and ecology. We also take this opportunity to showcase the work of visual artists working at the interface of art and plant science, and educators who use plants as a key subject in their education practice. The geographical reach of the contributions is also extensive with contributions from around the globe and the Twittersphere.

The Botanical within the Built: Visual Art and Urban Botany

2018

This research project considers the urban environment as a valuable site to examine humanity's relationship to nature, specifically botany, through a visual arts practice. Botany as it is used here is defined as all plant life. The project investigates a fascination with the evidence of humans' endeavours to contain, control, and manipulate the flora in their urban habitats. The creative works and exegesis speculatively explore the potential of everyday urban encounters with botany to perceive nature as something intrinsic to both the city and ourselves, by considering flora as a tactile, vital cohabitant.Using botany as a metonym for the wider natural world, the creative works are informed by specific contemporary environmental issues, including habitat damage and encroachment, and the effects of waste associated with consumer culture. Urban botanical sites and domesticated plants have informed the drawings, sculpture, and installations that form the studio outcomes. In add...

Keeping life going: Plants and people today, yesterday and tomorrow

Social Compass

I review the contributions to this special issue by focusing on the relational qualities that bind people and plants together through religious ritualization of economic activities such as crop cultivation or plant gathering in the wild. I show how an attention to plants as teachers facilitates cross-cultural comparative analysis.

Plant totemism. Toward a new imaginary of the plants in the Anthropocene

Im@go, 2020

The Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia coined the concept of "plant totemism" to define the new emerging relationship between humans and plants in the Anthropocene. Recently, the interest in plant life is increasing, thanks to new researches on trees' ability to perceive the environment they live in and to build social relationships. These topics exert great fascination in the social imaginary since they are rooted in popular culture and return in modern times in many science-fiction stories. Moreover, studies on plant intelligence first emerged in the pseudoscientific milieu of New Age. As a result, new forms of spirituality and pseudoscience emerge, from "forest bathing" to the "bioenergetic landscape". The article analyzes the different forms the rediscovery of plant life assumes in the modern imaginary, concluding that plant totemism can be considered a case study in social imaginary to understand the emergence of a new sicentific spirit that tries to reconcile human and non-human world.