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Paper short abstract

Uneven exchanges within human, vegetal, infrastructural, and economic relations define our food systems, and therefore our agricultural landscapes. This study uses multispecies ethnographic and arts-based fieldwork to imagine plant-human relations otherwise, taking asparagus as an explorative lens.

Paper long abstract

This paper brings multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology by using the concept of socialities as a guiding analytical tool to examine how a cultivated plant and its environment become entangled in extractive agricultural processes. Based on multispecies ethnographic and arts-based fieldwork on asparagus farms in South Tyrol (Northern Italy), the paper traces the socialities of asparagus - the assemblages and relations through which the plant acts and is acted upon.

The ambivalence of these assemblages is revealed by mobilising drawing, experimental cartography and material experimentation: the plant’s biological form resists full automation and demands careful human labour, creating moments of attentiveness and interdependence, while simultaneously reinforcing unequal labour relations and high-value consumption logics. Through these methods, the roles this vegetable takes on and are enacted through plant–human relations are traced. The arts-based methods also assist in confronting extractive practices while remaining attentive to fragile possibilities for attunement and care within our food systems.

Asparagus cultivation emerges as symptomatic of longer trajectories of landscape transformation. Although practiced on relatively small plots and often framed as a side activity to apple growing, asparagus is locally celebrated as Edelgemüse (noble vegetable), embedded in narratives of care, seasonality, and regional identity. At the same time, its cultivation relies on extractive land-use regimes established over the past century, characterised by increasing human control over edible plants. These include soil compaction and exhaustion, the bodily effects of picking and sorting work, and ecological vulnerabilities due to pesticide and fertilizer use.