Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant

PLANT INTELLIGENCE
October 31st to November 2nd, 2025
Basel Academy of Art and Design

The SNF research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant (2022-25) is coming to an end. In the framework of an international symposium, it brings together the artistic team (Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smit) with leading theorists, scientists, artists, curators and activists to discuss its findings with the audience. Theoretical, artistic, and experimental formats open up the discourse on plant intelligence and show how plants can be approached aesthetically and politically as intentional and cognizing beings.

Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW
In cooperation with HEK House of Electronic Arts Basel

Symposium language: English
Organized by Team Plants_Intelligence

Program:
Friday, October 31st

13:00 - 14:30
Part I: Concepts of (Plant) Intelligence

Intro by Yvonne Volkart
Birgit Schneider: Comparing Plant Cognition and AI

15:00 - 18:00
Part II Ingesting-digesting: Intelligence Within

Intro by Felipe Castelblanco
Rodrigo Camara-Leret
Keynote by Jeremy Narby: "Learning from Teacher Plants"
Discussion with Jeremy Narby and Rodrigo Camara-Leret
Marcos Filardi / Museo del Hambre (Online) Introduced by Julia Mensch
Ayënan Quinchoa and Heraldo Vallejo (Online): The Indigenous Pan-Amazon Perspective
Screening: Ayënan Quinchoa Juajibioy

18:00 - 21:00
Part III: Plant Companions at CIVIC
Participatory Lecture by Valentina Vetturi
Lecture Performance by Julia Mensch

Curated Dinner and Performative Input by KOMA Collective

Saturday, November 1st

9:30 - 12:15
Part I: Aesthetics and Politics of Plant Intelligence
Intro Day 2, Yvonne Volkart
Florianne Koechlin: "Plant whispers: How Plants Communicate and Network"
Keynote by Giovanni Aloi

13:30 - 17:00
Part II: Artistic Research moderated by Alexandra Toland
Julia Mensch
Katja Tielboerger
Rasa Smite
Felipe Castelblanco
Kathrin Meyer
Alexandra Toland
Screening: Ursula Damm

17:30 - 20:00
Part III: Plants_Intelligence at CIVIC
Listening Session, Julia Mensch and Sofia Viola
Solarceptors and VR works, Rasa Smite
Borrachero Dreams, Felipe Castelblanco

Harmonisation / Offering with Marilu Pacheco
Dinner by KOMA Collective

Sunday, November 2 at HeK

11:00 - 13:00
Cognizing Systems

Noelia Billi (Online)
Keynote by Michael Marder: The Soil as the Unconscious: A Thick and Opaque Image of Plant Intelligence

Against the backdrop of the current wasting of the world, we must think of other ways—vegetal ways—of worlding: ways that do not consume the world, but re/produce it. Co-Composing it with plants, we might learn to learn like them. Also, in the arts.

The team Plants_Intelligence approached this task by building on the speculative interdisciplinary discourse of plant intelligence. This discourse has been held since around 15 years at the fringes of botany, neurosciences, philosophy, and art. It is challenging and mindblowing, because scientific research can now prove what has been known to alternative plant knowledge for a long time, namely, that plants have capacities; that they behave and learn, cognize and process, produce and shape. We conceive plants as assemblages of physical and chemical materialities, of forces and efficacies that generate life far beyond human scale. They are actors in ecological concatenations and relational events. As such, they are situational, and responsive. They distinguish themselves from animal modes of making worlds, while also being affiliated with them and with us.

Together, and including different perspectives and approaches, we discuss what the recognition of the intelligence of plants implies for artistic questions and the formulation of an aesthetics and politics of the vegetal that tries to overcome our culture of wasting the world.

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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

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