Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant

Interspecies Love. Panel with Monica Gagliano, Wanuri Kahiu, Bo Zheng, curated and moderated by Yvonne Volkart

The panel Interspecies Love taking place on 28 May 2024, 4 – 8 pm, at Istituto Svizzero, Rome, is part of the event Kinship In Transformation. Interspecies Love is a cooperation of Istituto Svizzero and the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF. The narratives of kinship, love and networks of care are deeply rooted in the respective social structures and cultural systems. In the Western world and beyond, the definition and ideas of these concepts are closely tied to a capitalistic and heteronormative social structure that has furthered the maintenance of privileges for some, and the persistence of inequalities for others. The event Kinship In Transformation invites artists and researchers, such as Laura Tripaldi, among others, coming from different disciplinary backgrounds and artistic practices, to share their reflections and work, opening to alternative narratives about kinship and love that can nourish fresh perspectives.

Talk

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