Follow the Plants is an expanded invitation to follow plants through histories, growing seasons, metabolic cycles, literature, art, bodies, archives, and collective ritual. Bringing together artworks, dialogues, roundtables, essays, and scores, the publication offers both examples of and prompts for collective research, tracing the multiple worlds through which plants circulate and generate meaning.
Putting stories, knowledge systems, and critical methodologies into correspondence, Follow the Plants is grounded in a dynamic field of inquiry in which creative practices emerge through situated relations with the territories, ecologies, and imaginaries that plants inhabit and animate.
Attentive to plants as agents, interlocutors and companions in world making, the book explores how following plants can reorient aesthetic, political, and epistemic questions, cultivating new ways of attending to collectivity, interdependence and plant-human relations in artistic research.
Edited by Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore, design by Zenobia Ahmed.
With contributions by: AK Wane, Åsa Sonjasdotter, Alana Hunt, Annalee Davis, Banu Subramaniam, Beatriz Paz Jiménez, Christian Thompson, Clare Qualmann, Diana Vieira, Elia Nurvista, Franswa Tibere, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Grace Gloria Denis, Joana Quiroga, Johanes Jamil, Jorge Menna Barreto, Joshua Gebert, Joss Allen, Keg de Souza, Kristina Jones, Kyriaki Goni, Leone Contini, Lucy Davis, Madeleine Collie, Marta Fernández Calvo, Margherita Pevere, Matti Aikio, Mariana Martínez Balvanera, Nathalie Muchamad, Nida Sinnokrot (Sakiya), Nick Anderson, Rain Wu, Rubiane Maia, Shalini Krishan, Sirkku Rosi, Yvonne Billimore, Zayaan Khan and Zheng Bo.
The Follow The Plants book is published by Onomatopee and Discipline, and funded by Creative Australia, Saastamoinen Foundation, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Stanley Picker Gallery Kingston University, and the University of East London Sustainability Research Institute. Follow the Plants is supported through a Food Art Research Network and Bioart Society collaboration.
Available via Onomatopee and Discipline
Image: Book documentation © The Book Photographer
Reviews
“Follow the Plants is an incredibly precious book: a rich entanglement of critical texts, artistic practices and conversations by sharp, generous minds. Moving between plants, politics, environments, sciences and deep histories, it expands to encompass almost any field imaginable, then draws close again to intimate, personal and sensorial experience. As a collective project rooted in dialogue and exchange, it brings together an inspiring group of contributors whose brilliant projects continually open onto other thinkers, practices and worlds. Again and again, the book offers new perspectives on plants, on our relationships with them and each other, and on the words, senses and forms of attention through which we encounter and understand them.” — Marjolein van der Loo, In(ter)dependent Curator/Artist
“Both precise and compassionate, Follow the Plants is an exquisite example of what art and research can do at their best. The book and the project it documents centre plants across time and space, alongside their human stories, ensuring the complexity of planetary entanglements refuses the contemporary tendency towards simplification and homogenisation. As a collection of texts, Follow the Plants is as nourishing as it is compelling.” — Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Research & Emergence at the future Hartwig Museum