Plant Politics: vegetal ecologies and sustainable futures

Over the past ten years, contemporary artists have engaged with the sessility and silence of plants—the attributes that widely contributed to their historical objectification—in new and challenging ways. Through innovative aesthetic and speculative conceptual strategies, they have endowed plants with an undeniable physical presence, foregrounded the importance of alternative creative models, envisioned collective forms of intelligence and wisdom, and collaborated with plants to remedy ecological degradation. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Critical Plant Studies, this panel aims to deconstruct the foundations of the ideological base that today defines human-plant relations on the grounds of historical processes shaped by colonialist, capitalist, and ecological forces. Informed by Indigenous Knowledge, Black Humanities, Queer Ecologies, and Anthropocene Studies plants today proliferate across artistic media as, among others, emblems or resilience, reminders of past exploitations, indelible markers of cultural identity, or problematizers of social and cultural categories and hierarchies.

This panel invites contributions that critically address recent curatorial efforts as well as artist practices and approaches in which plants feature as agentially charged catalysts promoting positive and actual change.