Sunday, September 23, 2018

Workshop with Špela Petrič: Phytocracy in situ: Prototyping tools for the investigation of plant governance

In connection with the exhibition Strange Encounters with Vegetal Others

How did wheat manage to domesticate the human? From Pollan's perspective-bending "Botany of Desire" to the environmental humanities' "vegetal politics", the entanglements between plants and people are ubiquitous, mundane and often hiding in plain sight. As part of the inquiries into Vegetal Otherness, Špela Petrič set out to produce her own phytocracy-revealing onto-epistemological tools that are inspired by actual institutions/domains/cultural practices framing plant-people relations, but also playfully oblivious to their axioms and boundaries.






Photo by Miha Tursič

Photo by Miha Tursič


Photo by Miha Tursič


The open session invites participants to reflect on plant governance as governance of plants by joining in a fast and funny tool prototyping session to investigate the river Panke in the vicinity of Art Laboratory Berlin. The exercise connects to a wider questioning of artistic methodologies, mediations, narratives, with which we try to convey experiences with the vegetal that often escape words.


Photo by Miha Tursič










Photos by Art Laboratory Berlin unless otherwise noted

The workshop is based on Deep Phytocracy: Feral Songs, the work-in-progress Petri
č has been developing at Nida Art Colony, Lithuania and Osmoza, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

More information at: http://www.artlaboratory-berlin.org/html/eng-events-archive.htm

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