Plant Agents: Unfolding Another Spatial Layer
What role do plants play in your everyday spaces?
Architecture is generally understood as physical objects. But what happens when it becomes an extended concept that includes social and political dimensions as well as dynamics (Lefebvre 1992; Awan et al. 2011)? If we imagine the relations and interactions in these dimensions as threads or strings with arrows at both ends, who is standing at those ends, and what does this string figure (Haraway 2016) look like?
This seminar will examine our everyday spaces through a critical lens provided by the agents who are shaping the spaces. The particular focus will be on plant agents: people who engage in critical spatial practices (Rendell, 2016) that foster human-plant interactions—e.g., foragers, gardeners, horticulturists, architects, planners, artists, educators, or researchers—to tackle the multiple crises of our time: climate breakdown, the lack of a sense of social belonging, the loss of biodiversity and embodied knowledge.
Encountering and conversing with plant agents, we will unfold the spatial layers of human-plant relations and interactions through a journey of positioning while contemplating the role plants play in our everyday spaces. In this seminar, we will read plant agents and engage with them through discussion, reflection, mapping, and writing, as well as through other creative forms of expression such as drawing, photography, and crafts.
The outcomes will be compiled into a RISO-printed zine.
Literatur
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Wiley, 1992.
Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Routledge, 2011.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures. Duke University Press, 2016.
Rendell, Jane. “Critical Spatial Practice as Parrhesia.” MaHKUscript: Journal of Fine Art Research 1, no. 2 (2016): 1–8.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Jessica J. Lee. Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging. Hamish Hamilton, 2024.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. John Murray, 2021.
Van Geert, Anja. “Foraging: An Exploration Based on Science and Soul.” WORT Journal, 2024.
Randa Toko and Maia Magoga. “Foraging as Resistance.” In Wort Issue Two, Summer ’24, vol. 2. Wort Journal, 2024.
Petermann, Stephan, and Maria Mazzanti, eds. Volume 66: The Guide to Designing with Animals, Plants and Other Critters. Volume 66. Archis, 2024.
Marti Kheel. “From Healing Herbs to Deadly Drugs: Western Medicine’s War Against the Natural World.” In Living With Contradictions. Routledge, 1994.
Termine
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Introduction
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Interim presentation
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Final presentation
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Submission