Each Tuesday 2–5pm throughout Why Listen to Plants? we will meet, read, and listen to each other. rsvp for updates on texts, speakers, and meeting co-ordinates.
- Tue, 20. Nov Edinburgh Gardens
- Tue, 27. Nov RMIT Design Hub
- Tue, 04. Dec RMIT Design Hub
- Tue, 11. Dec Royal Botanic Gardens
This reading group is one branch of the WHY LISTEN TO PLANTS?, an exhibition program curated by Liquid Architecture co-artistic Director Danni Zuvela, and co-presented with RMIT Design Hub.
Plants exist within plurality; they are part of, and themselves contain many worlds. In the course of survival in its environment, a plant cultivates relationships with various non-human others with whom it shares the earth and air. Plants communicate through these interspecies proxies, passing messages through pollen, bacteria, and along underground filaments of vast mycelial networks. Less competitive than they are collaborative, these interspecies co-operations position plant partners as important co-creators of vegetal life - and suggest that mutual aid may be as much a condition of material existence as mutual struggle.
In this program of experimental plant-listening, we attempt to model the best features of these interspecies entanglements (reciprocity, mutualism, collective intelligence) while leaving behind the worst (co-dependency, parasitism). We explore plants as sites of collective organisation, and their collaborators microbes, fungi and bees as social protagonists. With so much to say, these super-organisms suggest expanded definitions of both non-human subjectivity, and the listening - discursive, decentred, yet embodied - necessary to tune into them.
