Plant Politics: Uncontainable Vegetal Agencies

Giovanni Aloi maps the ideological foundations that underpin human-plant relations in art to show how these have been shaped by colonialist, capitalist, and ecological forces. Working with plants in contemporary art entails surpassing the objectifying tropes that have defined past philosophical approaches to seriously and responsibly engage with cultural and ecological systems of interdependency. The artists featured in this lecture work with plants through a diverse range of media and operate in different geographical areas, but they all have in common the ability to foreground the uncontainable political agency of plants.