Short Abstract:

Are there anthropological lessons to be learnt from a focus on vegetal life, particularly ‘weeds’? Participants are invited to co-create a photo-essay on 'life support', by reflecting on plants in relation to care, control, colonisation, cultivation, enslavement, eradication, parasitism, and so on.

Long Abstract:

Irigaray, Marder and others have argued that respect for vegetal life entails nurturing all the potentialities proper to it, including those unproductive from the human point of view. How do we do this when we are still not sure of the full range of capacities and abilities of vegetal life? Are there anthropological lessons to be learnt from a focus on vegetal life, particularly forms of vegetal life that humans define as ‘weeds’? How do we start to visualise possibilities for vegetal life support (even if vision seems to be the wrong sensory medium through which to adequately represent vegetive being in the world)?

By focusing on ‘weeds’ as a conceptual tool, lab participants will be invited to reflect on the meanings and values of human and more-than-human life in relation to any of the following (among others): care, control, colonisation, cultivation, decolonisation, dependency, domestication, enslavement, extinction, fertility, growth, hybridity, invasion, migration, parasitism, resilience, relationality, territoriality. For example, we might look at links between slavery and plantation crops, weeds as the ultimate disposable slaves in the garden of the pure breed, the art and poetics of plants and their freedom, are plants colour blind or deeply racist? and so on.

Participants are invited to bring to the lab a couple of their own photographs featuring vegetal life. During the Lab we will collaboratively storyboard the images and text for a co-authored photo-essay.

Irigaray, L., & Marder, M. (2016). Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/irig17386

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/in-the-weeds

https://cupblog.org/2012/06/05/marder-and-francione-debate-plant-ethics/