Performing with Plants is an artistic research project at Stockholm University of the Arts in 2018-2019, funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, which will be finished by the time of the conference. My proposal is to present some of the works created as part of this project for discussion. A brief summary of the research plan (from 2016) reads as follows:

“Performing with plants is an artistic research project, which develops and specifies the question how to perform landscape today. A new materialist and post-humanist perspective prompt us to rethink the notion landscape and to consider how the surrounding world consists of creatures, life forms and material phenomena with varying degrees of volition, needs and agency. What forms of performing or activating landscape could be relevant in this situation? One possibility is to approach individual elements in a landscape, such as specific trees, and explore what can be done together with them, for instance how to perform for camera together. 

Rethinking our relationship to the environment is a central task for artists today. Artistic research can contribute through its capacity to allow and to generate hybrid forms of thinking and acting. This project participates in the discussion by way of a) developing artistic practices and producing art works that can critically question existing conventions and habits in our relationship to the environment and b) by theoretically reflecting, based on practical exploration, what it means to collaborate with plants and especially trees. The importance of the project rests ultimately on the importance of the plants themselves – they are producing the preconditions for oxygen-based life on the planet.

Click here to view the remains of this cancelled presentation on Research Catalogue