phytoturgies

phytoturgies is a project by nonhumanities that combines installation, performance, and video to activate and reimagine public relationships to the plant life of Morven Sustainability Lab, a vast landscape of unceded Monacan land developed into a slave plantation at the turn of the 19th century. Recycling the materials of nonhumanities’ past project series point to touch…, phytoturgies focuses attentional and performative tools on the overlooked and unspectacular but ecologically essential plant life that constitute the majority of Morven’s landscape.

Accompanied by a video that acts both as invitation into phytophilic logics and as partial score, the project’s performances bring the public from the institutional core of Morven's main house and formal gardens to its disused former entryway, spaces that trace both colonial logics of arrival and contemporary efforts at sustainability. Slow, multisensory engagements unfold along the route: guided walks, propagation practices, and embodied acts that ask participants to linger, hold, kneel, and gather. Refusing neoliberal framings of sustainability and methods of extractive identification, phytoturgies embraces propinquity as a precondition for interspecies understanding — being in the space of, and so becoming with, another.

See the website for phytoturgies here.

nonhumanities is an art collective consisting of Conrad Cheung, Anna Hogg, and Katie Schetlick that reimagines historically complicated spatial genres — mazes, gardens, trails — as sites for renewed attention and relation. Through participatory performance, video, and installation, nonhumanities develops slow, embodied practices to transform how publics engage with built environments and more-than-human life.