Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Sub-Atlantic Abyss
Get PDFThis is a text by the Brazilian dance maker, choreographer and performer Isis Andreatta. For Andreatta, “This writing is a reverie about inhabiting the abyss of sub-atlantic life. An outline of a storytelling about subverting physical and metaphysical margins. Diving. A confident act of raving deliriously along the edges is a way of existing beyond the stigmas of “Terra Firme”. For her, this text is a gesture to embody fiction as a commitment with a non hegemonic imaginary and an alliance between anticolonial, anti-racist and anti-manicomial practices.
Pine-ing for a Voice: Vegetal agencies, New Materialism and State Control through the Wollemi Pine
Get PDFAttending to Wollemia nobilis (Wollemi Pine), we read this plant as ensconced and mobilised by political and politicised forces, towards distinct colonial and imperial ends. Seeking to work beyond a language of flowers, we attune to the appropriation and weaponisation of plants; a language beyond the merely decorative or affective, towards understandings of plants performing agency and political power.
Our reading of the Wollemi pine emerges from the scorched summer of 2019/2020, in which much of Australia caught alight, and during which the Wollemi was placed in danger of disappearing for a second, and perhaps final, time. A prehistoric tree, long thought extinct, before its rediscovery in 1994, the Wollemi holds special significance, but further, value within an Australian cultural context. In light of this significance, the Wollemi is apprehended and manipulated towards political ends. Within the frame of this text, we consider not only the contemporary diplomacy and governance within which the Wollemi is ensnared, but too, the legacies of Invasion and colonisation which support the mobilisation of the Wollemi in this manner.
Framing our approach within the broader context of contemporary ecological theory and in a manner attentive to frames of New Materialism, we engage with the entanglements of plant language, agency and being — as a means through which we can attune to our shared mattering and ongoing struggles for sovereignty amidst a rapidly changing natural world.
Introduction: Plant Performance
Get PDFPlants perform their own interests and purposes. Plants perform in ways that afford and invite specific human experiences. Plants also perform complex biopolitical roles. With these multivalent understandings of plant performance in mind, this introduction to the “Plant Performance” issue of Performance Philosophy outlines the editors’ broadly feminist approach to the challenges facing scholars and artists in the field of Critical Plant Studies. We present these challenges, including colonisation and decolonisation, botanical aesthetics and its vegetal limits, instrumentality and vegetal respect, and phytopolitics and plant liveliness, as provocations for scholars and artists grappling with ecological, political and creative human relations with the vegetal world. The introduction, alongside the eight essays included in the issue, considers how thinking with plant performance might create conditions for a more contextual, critical, reflexive, nuanced, and/or urgent understanding of plant-human relationships, both historically and in the current moment. In addition to considering questions of plant performative agency, the issue foregrounds the politico-aesthetic conditions in which plant performances cannot help but occur. It details how specific works of performance art intervene in these conditions, and it contributes to the development of a more global and multiply-situated network of performative, critical plant knowledges, relations, and practices
Becoming Entangled: Queer Attachments with Hemiparasites
Get PDFWhat is that queer plant that drapes itself chaotically over the top of trees and bushes? You know the one along the road on the way into town?
Ah yes! You mean the one with no leaves, that looks like tangled yarn caught up in the branches?
Yes, it looks like its floating airborne on top of the canopy, smothering and embracing at the same time.
Well, that\u27s the one with the common name of snotty gobble or Dodder-Laurel!!! Dodder may look chaotic but that only demands on how you view it.
I can’t stop thinking about it, Let’s find out what it’s doing.
‘Learning to be affected’ says Bruno Latour is to be \u27moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans’(2004). And this is what happened to Down the Road Projects when we became intrigued with local plant parasites where we live in central Victoria, Australia.
This paper explores how we became ensnared by planty agencies. By charting our multispecies and human interactions in the course of developing the art project, Becoming Differently (2018), we trace how parasites came to be an important theme of the art, how they infiltrated the art works, how they changed our understanding of parasites, how they enticed us into the bush and developed our style of collaboration.
We ‘queery’ what it means to be ‘drawn towards’ particular plants, we wonder who or what is ‘drawing’, and how these particular plants inflected our art and writing. We consider how we were moved towards different ways of figuring identity and belonging, and how we grappled with practices and modes of engagement with complex issues of identity, belonging and nature in a settler-colonial situation, and how this led to us to become differently entangled in the place where we live
Plant Art from the Amazon: Tree Performance in the Work of Frans Krajcberg
Get PDFThis article examines plant performance in the work of naturalized Brazilian artist Frans Krajcberg (1921-2017). Krajcberg saw his art as a way to give voice to forest plants that are being systematically destroyed through fires and logging, to give way to agribusiness ventures. He used burnt trunks of Amazonian trees he collected after forest fires to create a series of sculptures that denounced the environmental crimes taking place in the region. I resort to biosemiotics, New Materialism and Indigenous, peasant and riverine Amazonian thought as possible theoretical frameworks to interpret Krajcberg\u27s sculptures as a human/plant collaboration that questions species divides and even the boundaries between living and non-living matter. The import of his pieces is clear: the bodies of the dead and charred trees are given a new life in Krajcberg’s work that incorporates them and turns them into art. I argue that his artworks are a fusion between the bare physically of the dead trees that speak to us through their materiality and the artist’s craft. The trees are very clearly inscribed into the sculptures that allow them to speak from beyond their grave, as it were, and to become living symbols of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest
Episode Five: Omikemi
No full textIn this final episode of the podcast, released under the full moon in Scorpio, Rajni Shah and Omikemi engage in a long, slow, deep conversation, in which they reflect on the entanglements between the felt world of lived experiences and the systems within which we live our lives.
Infused by the sounds and shapes of the ocean, this episode feels intimate and visceral – and perhaps more than any of the others, like an invitation to eavesdrop on a conversation between friends.
In the accompanying offering, Omikemi invites listeners to spend time with a question that was present for them at the time of recording.
Click here for full episode and credits
Making New Land: An Intertidal Aesthetics
Get PDFMaking New Land is an essay in theory-fiction set in a near future, where the oceans have disappeared. In these devastated landscapes, a first person narrator investigates unsolved biological enigmas on Earth and on Mars. In the footsteps of a fictional group of Anarcho-botanists called Sea for Space, the story alternates a melancholic longing for the beauty of intertidal and coastal lifeforms with futuristic visions of new species engineered by humans as new companions.
The scenario explores archetypal figures of plant-human coexistence: from the botanical gaze to a nostalgic longing for connection, and from the hubris of genetical engineering to the dream of a post-humanism communion with the vegetal. The fictional story is interwoven with scholarly references and a critical discussions of artistic and literary works dealing with the fauna, flora and mythologies of the seaside, which form the outlines of an \u27Intertidal Aesthetics\u27
Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet\u27s Rhodon and Iris
Get PDFThis essay investigates the performativity of plants in Ralph Knevet’s Rhodon and Iris, a play that was written and performed for a feast held by the Norwich Society of Florists in 1631. The play explores at least two forms of performativity: the first is the act of staging plants for a theatrical performance, where vegetables present their virtues through floral allegories that are enacted by human players. The second form is the way plants affect and are affected by their environments, particularly as theorized by Michael Marder and Mel Y. Chen. In Rhodon and Iris, these two dimensions work together to produce a form of floral agency that decenters the human. The essay explores how floral agency collaborates with literary narratives when beings perform for plants (within a history of floral celebrations), as plants (embodying plants as allegorical figures), and with plants (floral characters using plants as ingredients in cosmetics, poisons, and antidotes). Knevet uses literature to articulate a unique plant philosophy that challenges divisions between art and nature and among literature, philosophy, and science. Rhodon and Iris thus illustrates the many ways that theatrical performances and printed playbooks, and even printed herbals and herbaria, responded to and shaped the performativity of plants
Ash Stories: A Spell Against Forgetting
Get PDFThis paper shares the strategies of The Ash Project (2016-2019), a public art project through which we worked to commission a memorial sculpture and a series of walks, talks, workshops and exhibitions to create closer relationships between ash trees and local publics in South East England. The paper tells the story of ash dieback a deadly fungus that attacks the trees vascular system causing the death of ash trees across Europe. Exploring ash trees and their place in European myth and identity, the paper situates the concerns of the ash within broader thinking about capitalisms intensifying impact on nature. The paper shares the way in which trade in plants creates increasing risks to plant health and the chain of species and landscape loss that follows. The writing moves between the situated knowledges that arose during the project to investigating the place of ash in the colonised landscapes of Australia, to think about the way in which plants might perform complex relationships to a collective sense of national and colonial identity through an exploration of ash migrations via acclimatisation societies in Australia and New Zealand. Finally the essay shares reflections on grief, asking how we might perform memorial acts of walking and remembering as an approach to ethical relationality to place that acknowledges our complex shared histories in multi-species entanglements.
Collaborating with(in) the Garden: Stewardship, Performance, and Thinking Beyond the Spatio-Temporal Formations of Institutional Legacies
Get PDFWhat might it mean to conceptualize stewardship as a multi-species performance that contests the spatio-temporal boundaries of institutions? The proposed paper focuses on the Native American Medicine Garden (NAMG) on the University of Minnesota campus and the stewardship of Cânté Sütá (Oglala Lakota), paying specific attention to the role of plants in a distinctly Lakota-led initiative. I consider the NAMG as an undercommons, a generative site to challenge conformist settler logics governing land use (i.e., Morrill Act) and to envision not-yet thought modes of co-existence. I think from the garden to consider the relationship between stewardship and performance, arguing that the NAMG - as a pedagogical space of possibility - expands how and for whom coaltions are built. The NAMG sets the conditions for resistance by entities that likely would be identified as auxiliary or inert within settler-colonial notions of land-use, inviting non-native participants to approach the formation of plants not as an object of analysis, but as co-constituting philosophical thoughts and possibilities for existence