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. Reddleman and Fuggle will begin by taking up the case of the Ginkgo Biloba – often described as a ‘living fossil’ due to the fact it has remained unchanged for over 80 million years.
Drawing on Claire Reddleman’s research, and its arrival in Britain in the 18th Century, they will consider the ways in which the ginkgo has become an important presence in the British landscape. The speakers will then look at the castor bean, a very different plant, which has been used by humans for at least 24,000 years. In the late 19th century, the castor bean’s best-known product, castor oil, started to be used as a lubricant for car and aircraft engines. It enabled greater speed and fluidity, and joined fossil fuels in the service of capitalism’s quest for ever faster, ever more efficient movement. Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and others call this era the ‘plantationocene‘, to identify how capitalism, colonialism and labour have, often destructively, shaped the natural world.
Free – open to everyone.
Taking place online via YouTube.
Plants Beyond Empire is 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. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
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.
Claire Reddleman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester and works on digital cultural heritage, visual methods, mapping and contemporary art including her recent project ‘Ginkgos of the British Isles‘. She is a photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman.com / @reddlemap
Photo credit – dendrologista by Claire Reddleman. Map credit – 1725 Kaart van de provincie Utrecht, François Halma, collection of Universiteitsbibliotheek, Utrecht
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.
Birmingham Botanical Gardens was founded in 1832, originally as a site of botanical and horticultural research and later with a greater emphasis on leisure and wellbeing.
Similar to many Botanic Gardens, its collection is linked to colonial expansion and trade. These links can be observed throughout the site, for example through the economic plants in the glass houses or the ornamental plants from China at the Wilson border, named after the ‘plant hunter’ Ernest Henry Wilson who brought plants over to the UK.
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.
Free – open to everyone.
Taking place online via YouTube.
Plants Beyond Empire is 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. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
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.
Jen Ridding is currently the Head of Engagement & Learning at Birmingham Botanical Gardens. A dynamic cultural leader, Jen is experienced in strategic development of Learning, Audience Development, Engagement and Visitor Services. Skilled in bringing people, stories and ideas together, Jen has a successful track record in designing innovative engagement strategies across a range of arts, heritage and culture settings.
Photo credit: Birmingham Botanical Garden (2024). Photo courtesy of 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.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of Bonington Gallery’s Formations programme, in partnership with NTU’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
**No audio between 04:36 and 07:46, presenter repeats the start of her talk after the screening of the film later in the event. At 22:42 the speaker cut out, which has been cut from the video. This causes a small pause that lasts 6 seconds**
Rebecca Beinart is an artist, educator and curator, based in Nottingham. She develops research-based, collaborative and site-based projects that evolve through long-term engagement with places and people. She makes sculpture, installation and performance, and uses live engagement and public dialogue to reflect on collective histories and futures, social and environmental justice, knowledge-making, and the politics of public space.
Photo credit: Film Stills, Freddy Griffiths. Courtesy Rebecca Beinart.