This panel examines how contemporary Latin American artists and writers engage with the “critical plant turn,” a shift in scholarship that foregrounds vegetal life as a site for reimagining more-than-human relations amidst extractive economies and ecological crises. Situated within Latin America’s historically layered and geopolitically fraught landscapes, these talks explore botanical vitality in the Anthropocene. By focusing on the material semiosis of plants, the panel addresses extractive regimes and anthropogenic shifts, tracing the sociopolitical trajectories set in motion by vegetal agency. Key questions include: How do plants restructure narrative organization and the distribution of voice? What relational forms emerge when vegetal life enters artistic practice as a locus of meaning? And how do these works respond to long histories of land transformation? Building on the scholarship of Lesley Wylie, Patrícia Vieira, and Eduardo Kohn—who challenge the nature-culture divide—this panel explores how Latin American vegetal aesthetics foster new ways of sensing and inhabiting more-than-human worlds.

In “Plant Parataxis: Seba Calfuqueo’s Esporas and Vegetable Becomings” (15 minutes), Carolina A. Díaz explores an “ecological sonority” in the visual work of Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo, specifically the 2021 photographic series, Esporas (Spores). Mapu, the Mapuche term for earth (tierra), encompasses a broad range of meanings from physical land and territory to the infinite universe and space. Building upon scholar Cárcamo Huechante’s affirmation that Mapu constitutes a sonorous field of multiple beings and forces, Díaz examines how Calfuqueo sensuously entwines their body with stones, trees, water, moss, and lichens to portray humans’ embeddedness and inseparability from the earth. Specifically, Díaz explores a “plant parataxis”—a plural, vegetable composition that functions as participation or symbiosis between Calfuqueo’s weye (nonbinary) being, the calchacura (lichen) fungal-algal partnership, and the calmín (moss) multicellular, sponge-like being. Recurring to the capacious Mapuche concept of itrofill mongen (“all life without exception”), Díaz constructs a trans-corporeal net or human-plant assemblage characterized by a “noisy” interspecies vitality that disrupts fixed, unitary identities and embraces multiplicity.

In “Unsettling Nature: Humanization and Otherness in two stories by Edmundo Paz Soldán” (15 minutes), Federico Correa Pose examines two short stories in which plants and trees take center stage over human characters: “El increíble hombre del pantano” (The Incredible Swamp Man) and “La reserva del puma” (The Puma Reserve), both part of Edmundo Paz Soldán’s El comienzo del paraíso (2025). In the first, a war pilot crashes in the jungle and gradually becomes absorbed by the vegetation, transforming into a hybrid of human and plant. In the second, a strangler tree grows in a park in the Bolivian jungle, at a time of exploitation and pollution so severe that it has even given rise to another type of tree, the “plastic tree.” Correa Pose suggests that both stories stage the tension at the heart of contemporary posthumanist imagination that seeks to decenter the human: on the one hand, nature becomes humanized, acquiring human traits or aligning itself with the human; on the other, it takes center stage as something alive, even terrifying, yet always remaining at a distance and never acquiring language or human qualities.

Finally, in “Plant Witnessing: Multispecies Testimony in Latin America’s Extractive Zones” (15 minutes), Nicolás Campisi examines a poetry collection from Colombia and a novel from Brazil in which plant life becomes a privileged site of witnessing within contemporary extractive and plantation economies. Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s La mata (2020; trans. The Brush, 2024) reconstructs the 2000 El Salado massacre through a polyphonic structure that includes perspectives from surrounding vegetation. Mariana Salomão Carrara’s A árvore mais sozinha do mundo (2024; trans. The Loneliest Tree in the World, 2026) redistributes narration across a more-than-human environment encompassing trees and nonhuman agents. Campisi argues that these works relocate testimonial authority beyond the human by staging vegetal and multispecies forms of witnessing. The texts give literary form to contemporary debates over rights-of-nature legislation and legal animism, particularly questions about whether nonhuman beings can be recognized as speaking subjects and bearers of testimony.

The panel will include Amanda M. Smith (UC Santa Cruz) as discussant (5-7 minutes). Professor Smith is the author of Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool University Press, 2021). She is also co-editor of The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, former director of a Modern Endangered Archives Program grant to digitize the collections of the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru, and current director of an Endangered Archives Programme grant from the British Library to continue this work in Iquitos.