Field drawings allow this project to observe plants' behavior in situ closely. In light of drawing's long and complicated history in botany and colonial sciences, Colonizers and European botanists used the botanic illustration to catalogue the exotic realm of vegetation they encountered in, for example, the American Continent after the Spanish Conquest.

I use the medium in a different direction: not to catalogue weeds or "illustrate" their vegetal and aesthetic characteristics but as a method to slow down observation time. Drawing is understood here to be a way of thinking, which by slowing time, the person drawing must slow down, trace singularities, and sharpen their senses of attention and observation without the need for technological devices. I want to become slow: to further develop senses of perception that enable me to understand the realm of vegetation—but also weeds' historical and political characteristics. Drawing is also a method of taking visual notes about amaranth growth behaviour, allowing me to create connections between amaranth and other resistant weeds' vegetal and political characteristics.

I start the field drawings where the amaranth plans grow in situ (at the visited fields in Argentina and my cultivation of amaranth species in Berlin) and continue at the studio. The drawings are a form of in-depth observation of the growth process of my teacher's plant.


2Field Drawing: Laura Santos