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Click here to join the Zoom- Lecture  on 21/08/2023 at 10 a.m. (CEST)

Meeting-ID: 868 1969 6799
Kenncode: 121715

About

Plants are habitually viewed as mute living beings, existing without the possibility of self-expression. In this talk, I suggest that plants not only silently tell us something (indeed, a great deal) about themselves and the world, but also that they tell stories, rendering witness accounts of life and death, light and darkness, middles, beginnings, and ends. After correlating vegetal storytelling with the ancient muthos that survives the onslaught of logos, I concentrate on three levels of this storytelling: 1) the story of plant life; 2) stories of plant communities; and 3) stories of individual plants. Jointly, these three levels comprise the philosophy of stories plants tell.

Bio

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013); Phenomena — Critique — Logos (2014); The Philosopher’s Plant (2014); Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020); Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel’s Energy (2021); Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), and The Phoenix Complex (2023), among others. For more information, consult his website michael​marder​.org.

What does it mean to curate a design project in the frame of Climate Change? What are our responsibilities as curators, researchers and designers? How can we participate in challenging old assumptions and build novel narratives that go beyond a purely human-centred understanding of the world? Curating Change proposes to look at curation as an act of care and activism, a process through which we can shape meaningful worldviews that take into consideration all beings and an instrument with which to raise critical questions and mediate issues linked to the current environmental and social crises.

d‑o-t‑s

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Following meadows, fields, and gardens, Weaving nettle tales explores borders of control opposed to symbiotic relations. How can we find a balance between extraction and returning gestures to the land and each other? How can we move from owning to owing? During the course, we will practise this balancing through making teas for the soil and ourselves. We will connect to local community gardens and research compost teas based on nettle traditionally used in many European rural households. Alongside making teas for the land, we will brew teas and ferments that nourish our own bodies based on ingredients foraged from local surroundings. Preparing and sharing these brewing routines of care will be central elements throughout the workshop.

ERBA

Workshop details

Are we smart enough to know how smart plants are? We are just beginning to acknowledge that non-human animals might have intelligence, but accepting that plants might requires a radical shift. Understanding other ways to be in the world will probably show us that human intelligence is not quite as special as we like to think.

Paco Calvo reveals in his talk the kind of mental shift needed to enter into the plant world, to put oneself imaginatively into the being of an entirely different kind of organism. One of the first obstacles we must face, a key ​‘switch’ we need to flick, is to shift our mindset so that we no longer see plants merely as resources for carbon capture or safeguarding food production, but as actors alongside us in the climate crisis. Losing our assumed place at the top of some imagined hierarchy might seem galling but the rewards of shifting our perceptions will be wondrous.

Bio

Paco Calvo (PhD, University of Glasgow, 2000) is a Professor of Philosophy of Science, and Principal Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory (MINTLab) at the University of Murcia (Spain).

His research interests range broadly within the cognitive sciences, with special emphasis on plant intelligence, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science, robotics and AI.

He uses time-lapse photography to explore perception-action and learning in plants. His scientific articles have appeared in Annals of Botany, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Journal of the Royal Society, Plant, Cell & Environment, Plant Signaling & Behavior, Scientific Reports, and Trends in Plant Science, among other journals. He is co-author with Natalie Lawrence of Planta Sapiens (Little, Brown (UK); Norton (US)).

The workshop Greenhouse Grooves is an invitation to discover the world of plants from a sonic perspective and the world of sound from a plant perspective. There is an ocean of auditory stimuli that fall outside of our human hearing and that can open the path to new means of approaching the world, if only we could perceive them.

Passepartout Duo

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How can we develop deeper empathy and understanding of our more-than-human communities? Is it possible to de-centre human perspectives through our embodied experience when consciously inviting multifarious perspectives to our relational fields? Can embodied knowledges bring about more nuanced interconnectedness between our social selves and our local/​global ecologies?

Simone Kenyon

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This presentation begins with the small gift of a rhubarb crown from a neighbor. The plant came with a story, as garden gifts often do: its ancestor was rescued from her grandmother’s farm years earlier, when she died and the property was sold for a housing development. As the rhubarb grows roots in its new location, it brings this story with it and folds its new place in my garden into its ongoing, rhizomatic memory. This memory includes not only the organismic impressions of its various travels, but also the chemical record of the changes to the land and soil in which it has participated as part of an ongoing, settler-colonial agricultural assemblage. At the same time as my neighbor remembers the taste of her grandmother’s rhubarb pie, the plant remembers its place-based interactions with her grandmother.

Combining personal reflection, literary interlocution, biopolitical tracing, and recent scholarship in critical plant studies on vegetal worlding, this presentation considers gardens as rich sites of mingling between multiple forms of memory: embodied, biographical, vegetal, microbial, ancestral, social, political, geological. Given the long history of gardens as memorials, and in light of recent work that posits gardening as a potential practice of ethical, multispecies encounter, the presentation asks: what might be the value of thinking with the collisions between what we remember with gardens, and what they remember with us?

Bio

Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a professor of environmental arts and justice in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University (Toronto). Her recent work on plants and vegetal relationships includes essays in Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn; The Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities; Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose; Plant Fever: Towards a Phyto-Centric Design; Veer Ecology: Key Words for Ecotheory; Resilience; Women’ Studies; and Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. She is at work on a book, Plantasmagoria, that combines biopolitical investigation with personal essay. 

We all love an avocado, the star of every Sunday brunch, the wholesome fruit full of amino acids, the miraculous vegan alternative to a lot of animal products, the most instagrammable millennial food. But have you ever considered the impacts of global demand for this Mexican fruit?

Fernando Laposse

Workshop details

The Harvest is a research-based workshop that invites participants to conceive and produce garments and accessories using raw plants – wild or cultivated – collected in the vicinity of Pillnitz Park & Palace. A special focus of the course will be the experimentation with straw, using different techniques, e.g. braiding, twining, spinning, crocheting, and weaving that Bruschi has explored over the years.

Emma Bruschi

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