Image: Sirkku Rosi, Bundle, aquarelle on paper, 2025.

Bioart Society and Food Art Research Network invite you to join us for a lively research assembly to celebrate and activate the newly launched publication Follow the Plants, edited by Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore, and published by Discipline and Onomatopee.  

Follow the Plants gathers artists, writers and researchers who engage with plants as collaborators, teachers, and political agents, and engages critical research by interrogating the economic, political, and colonial forces that have shaped human-plant relations. 

The book's contributions invite us into processes of encounter and entanglement that explore intersections of art, science and  ecology, through diverse knowledges and situated practices. In response, the assembly establishes correspondences between the publications contributions, and local practitioners, places and publics in Helsinki, inviting further processes of collective research to unfurl beyond the page. 

This free, multi-day open programme brings research to life through film, performance and social practice. Both theoretical and embodied, it unfolds through growing, cultivation and food-based practices, situating artistic research within the creative lives of plants. 

The assembly programme is realised in a city wide partnership and will take place at HIAP - Helsinki International Artist Programme, Helsinki Art Museum, Kaisanemi Botanic Garden (outdoor garden), Kenno Filmi and Cinema Orion, and Koekeittiö / Test Kitchen. 

The assembly is generously funded by Saastamoinen Foundation with support from the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

The Follow The Plants book is published by Onomatopee and Discipline, and funded by Creative Australia, Saastamoinen Foundation, Frame Contemporary Art Finland and the University of East London Sustainability Research Institute.

Full programme and list of contributors announced in June.