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Paper short abstract

Based on an analysis of the research and creative work of the contemporary artist aniara rodado and her proposal for a creative partnership with plants, I discuss some of the potential and challenges of the encounter between contemporary art and anthropology.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I discuss the research and creative work of the Colombian contemporary artist aniara rodado and her proposal for a creative partnership with plants that gives rise to "vegetable dances" and a "garden of the end of the world." Analysing primarily the works “Transmutation de base - Alien/migration” (2016), “Notación y Transmisión del Movimiento de una Ruda” (2017), and “Crème pour voler” (2019-2025), and paying attention to a series of experiments and encounters involving humans and non-humans that allowed for the creation of these artworks, as well as the emergence of the idea of “transspecific collaboration” between the artist and some plant species, I discuss the notions of “co-presence”, “shared authorship”, “ethical commitment to non-human beings” and “responsibility”, highlighting the transdisciplinary contaminations and the intense material-semiotic flow between art and science (including anthropology) that animates them. Discussing also my entry into this collaborative endeavour through the realization of my ethnographic research, I argue that from the moment I am invited to collaborate on some of the artist's projects, new creative ventures begin, producing new contaminations, further blurring the boundaries between artistic creation, anthropological research, and world creation, or even between art, science, and politics. Interested in the potential of the encounter between anthropology and contemporary art, I seek to reflect on the following questions: How to articulate artistic and anthropological intentions, methodologies, and projects with ecological concerns? How to produce more-than-human co-creative practices in the encounter between art and anthropology, thus making transdisciplinary projects also transspecific?