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Paper short abstract

A phytocritical interpretation of Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden and Joseph Tasnádi’s Joyride highlights often overlooked plant agency in human transportation, evoking human care and kinship, and fostering more-than-human perspectives on movement and ecological entanglement.

Paper long abstract

Perceived as immobile, rigid, and fragile and moving at temporal scales much slower than humans, plants are often overlooked as active participants in transportation, especially in motorized traffic. Yet, in the Anthropocene era, plants’ lives are profoundly shaped by these phenomena, revealing both conflict and entanglement between mobility and vegetal temporality. In the ecological crises of today, it is essential to be able to assume the plant perspective and recognize plants’ roles within transportation contexts. If regarded though a phytocritical lens, contemporary art can help understand the controversial interactions of vegetation and transportation.

Salomé Jashi’s captivating documentary Taming the Garden (2021) exemplifies this dynamic: centuries-old trees are separated from the nurturing ground and transported across landscapes and the sea, highlighting the tension between human-engineered mobility and plant longevity. The trees’ sheer size and temporal depth assert their agency, resisting full instrumentalization even as they are moved. Similarly, Joseph Tasnádi’s installation Joyride engages with the entanglement of plant life and human transport, dramatizing a true story where a tree grew through an impounded car, creating a site where human mobility and recklessness intersect with vegetal presence.

Together with further examples, these instances sketch a wide symbolic field around plants and more importantly, they also reveal them as individuals with their own strivings and sufferings towards whom we humans can feel care and kinship. These intersections thus situate plant agency not only as a theoretical concern but as a lived phenomenon, inviting more-than-human perspectives in understanding movement, cohabitation, and ecological ethics.