2 Feb 2024
We are delighted to announce a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of our Formations programme, in partnership with the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. They will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
Image credit: Sophie Fuggle.
Bringing together interlocuters from a variety creative, botanical and creative backgrounds, the human-plant stories told across the series will draw on a variety of philosophical, historical and artistic perspectives.
In proposing the concept of the ‘plantationocene’ as one (of multiple) possible ways to understand the planet-wide impact of industrial capitalism and colonialism, Donna Haraway describes how the wide-scale agriculture and cultivation projects of empire differed significantly from earlier forms of seed dispersal due to factors of ‘scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and complexity’ (Haraway, 2015). Colonial institutions, in particular Botanic Gardens, played an integral role in the distribution of seeds and research into economic crops leading to changes in economy and landscape (Barnard 2016). In their conversations around vegetal being, Luce Irigaray and Mark Marder (2016) have argued that greater understanding of plants and the worlds they create and sustain is key to our own development and, moreover, the survival of the planet.
Moving plants from landscape to centre stage, we will be looking at the different roles they play in shaping the world as we know it, from conceptions of time, growth, invasion, dispersal and dissemination to ideas around beauty, colour, form and structure.
Plants Beyond Empire is curated by Sophie Fuggle and Katharina Massing.
Join artist Rebecca Beinart for a free online talk where she will share stories and work-in-progress from her long term research into plant-human relationships, medicine and porous bodies.
During this talk she will share a short film made in collaboration with Usha Mahenthiralingam and Freddy Griffiths. The work explores the Island site in Nottingham – that once housed the Boots pharmaceutical factories and is currently under redevelopment – and spills out into histories of plant medicine, land, bioprospecting, pharmaceutical production, and thinking with plants and fungi.
Find out more and book your ticket here.
Join Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding for an online talk exploring how Birmingham Botanical Gardens is working with local communities and visitors to highlight its colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation.
Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding will look at how the garden is working with local communities and visitors to highlight some of these colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation.
Find out more and book your ticket here.
For the third and final event from our Plants Beyond Empire series, Claire Reddleman and Sophie Fuggle will explore how plants have become aligned with human ideas about time, seasons and cycles.
Many plants have been co-opted into colonial and capitalist ways of understanding time. For this talk, Reddleman and Fuggle will focus upon the Ginkgo Biloba – often described as a ‘living fossil’ due to the fact it has remained unchanged for over 80 million years, and the castor bean, a very different plant, which has been used by humans for at least 24,000 years.
Find out more and book your ticket here.
Sophie Fuggle’s research focuses on connections between empire and ecology. She has conducted extensive field and archival work in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam looking at the legacy of France’s overseas penal colonies. Most recently she has begun to explore the colonial, cultural histories of the castor bean plant.
Katharina Massing is a museum and heritage expert interested in holistic approaches to the safeguarding of landscape and traditional knowledge and sustainable heritage practices. She teaches and researches on ways museums can engage with and communicate anthropogenic changes. At the moment she is involved in a project between Nottingham Trent University and Birmingham Botanical Gardens that investigates diversifying ways in which plant stories are told.
Established in 2020, Formations is an event programme led by NTU’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group in collaboration with Bonington Gallery. The series foregrounds the work of underrepresented writers, academics, artists, intellectuals and activists worldwide who address inequalities of all kinds, often bringing people from different places and working practices together for important conversations.