Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant

Plants_Intelligence Symposium

International Symposium of the Research Projekt Projekt Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like Plant at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW in cooperation with HEK House of Electronic Arts Basel. Oct 31st - Nov 2nd, 2025 ...
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RIXC Art and Science Festival 2025: Plants Intelligence

Exhibition Latvia Riga Symposium

Fábulas de humo y polvo

Exhibition presenting outcomes of the ongoing research by team member Julia Mensch.

Exhibition

Unter Pflanzen

Curated by Kathrin Meyer and Yvonne Volkart, with Moritz Ohlig and Sophie Olivotto. With art works by Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits, Ayënan Quinchoa Juajibioy and Ursula Damm.

Malezas Resistentes

Workshop by Julia Mensch in collaboration with María Vilca (Community Garten Las Yungas). In the frame of the program Las Tres Ecologías, curated by Alfredo Aracil, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.

Keynote / Workshop: For Plant Intelligence

On the occassion of the MESH Festival, on October 18th 18:00 hrs, the Plants_Intelligence Team hosts the Keynote by writer, philospher and MINT Lab director Paco Calvo with input by Ayënan Quinchoa, Kamnëstá Media Creator. Introduction by Yvonne Volkart and Moderated by Rasa Smit

Keynote Panel Plants Talk Workshop

Colorado

Solo exhibition and lecture performance by Julia Mensch, curated by Lucia Schoppenhorst, Martin Leibinger, and Sarah Nicola, presented in the frame of 'Home Repair'.

Exhibition

Plant Intelligence: A conversation with Monika Messmer and Rasa Smite

Taking place on April 14, 2024, at Rehmann Museum in Laufenburg, the event is a discussion between Monika Messmer, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL in Frick, and Rasa Smite, researcher at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Monika Messmer will explore the question of how plants forge alliances. She will also talk about the breeding research at FiBL, which investigates how plants interact with soil microorganisms. Rasa Smite will present the research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant, which asks from the perspective of art whether the recognition of vegetal forms of intelligence might lead to other methods of knowledge generation, coexistence, breeding and to new, “intelligent” forms of plant and agricultural culture

Switzerland Talk

El Ombligo del Mundo [the Belly Button of the World] Curated by Adriana Dominguez

Exhibition featuring ongoing research and video works by team member Felipe Castelblanco made during his field trips. The series titled Detrás de la Noche [Behind the Night] was produced mainly at Camino Verde Reforestation Station, on the banks of the Tambopata River in Madre de Dios region of the Peruvian Amazon. The area is a living seed bank, and a hugely important buffer zone where endangered Amazonia plants and trees are given space and time to thrive. However, during the gold mining rush in Madre de Dios of the last decade, and the desperation of conservation experts, scientists and Indigenous communities trying to mitigate the damage caused by deforestation and mercury poisoning of soils, air and rivers, plant teachers like Bobinzana are again called upon to teach us plant-led remediation and worlding

Exhibition

Glossary

Borrachero Andaki

From the Solanaceae family, the Borrachero Adaki (or Culebra) is a variety of the Brugmansia plant form the high Andes and humid rainforest of Colombia, thought to be a cultigen because its presence is most often related to human settlements where the plant has been cultivated. In 1942, Richard Evan Schultes encountered this rare variety of the Burgmansia plant. Its leaves narrower, resembling a knife and “the corolla almost divided into separate petals united only towards their bases.”

He named this variety Methysticodendron Amesianum [the Mutant Sleep Tree], or also known as Borrachero Culebra.

Richard Evans Schultes, “A NEW NARCOTIC GENUS FROM THE AMAZON SLOPE OF THE COLOMBIAN ANDES.” Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University 17, no. 1 (1955): 1–11. See term

Buen vivir

Good Living is an old-new paradigm based on the indigenous concept of Sumac Kawsay. It is a concept in collective construction in Latin America that seeks alternatives to the Western idea of development, linking indigenous traditions and worldviews with critical ideas within Western modernity. Buen vivir proposes to abandon the idea of development as unlimited economic growth and to substitute it for a supportive and sustainable economy, displacing the centrality of humans, recognizing the centrality and value of nonhumans, and the rights of Nature.

Mónica Chuji, Grimaldo Rengifo, and Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen Vivir,” in “Pluriverse. A Post-Development Dictionary”, eds. A. Kothari, A. Salleh, A. Escobar, F. Demaria & A. Acosta, (Tulika & Authors Upfront, New Delhi, 2019), 112. See term

Plasticity

Plasticity is an individual plant response to the environmental change as it is called in ecology and evolution studies. According to the view of natural scientists (such as Trewavas), the “intelligent behavior” by plants shows rather during their individual life time scale, and that this process is not an evolution. See term

Resistant weeds

Term given by industrial agriculture to spontaneous vegetation resistant to agrochemicals used in transgenic monocultures. See term

Senti-pensar

Eduardo Galeano once said that our society often separates our soul from the body and mind from heart. To avoid this, Galeano proposed the concept of "senti-pensando" which means feeling-thinking. He learned this wisdom from Colombian fishermen who created the word "sentipensante" to describe language that speaks the truth.

Eduardo Galeano, "The book of embraces,” Trans. Cedric Belfrage, ed. W.W. Norton, (New York, 1991), 221. See term

Weeds

Over 50 years ago, biologist Edwin R. Spencer stated that “any plant is a weed if it insists on growing where the farmer wants another plant to grow. It is a plant that is out of place, according to one person's judgment, but according to the good judgment of nature it is perfectly in its place.”

Edwin Rollin Spencer, in “Malezas comestibles del Cono Sur y otras partes del planeta," E. H. Rapaport, A. Marzocca, S. B. Drausal, (Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Bariloche, 2009), 3. See term