Performance-based, ‘Pet Plants’ symposium challenges human-plant relationships
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To Lily Wong, plants are more than decor – they are interconnected with architecture and humans, and could even be seen as pets.
“When you think about pets, for example, dogs, right? You don’t think of them as things that produce utility, you don’t just keep pets… you build relationships with them,” Wong said. “Is there a way that we can think about plants, either flowers, shrubs, herbaceous plants or trees in a similar way?”
Wong, the Harry Der Boghosian fellow in the School of Architecture this year, has spent the last eight months pursuing her research about how plants can hold significance across many disciplines. Her research is focused on the production of semi-tropical and tropical species of plants that are displayed inside buildings. This Wednesday, she organized a symposium entitled “Pet Plants” that focused on looking at plants through a new lens.
Wong said the title “Pet Plants” is meant to denote a relationship between humans and plants that is based on care, rather than utility. She wanted to emphasize the idea of a relationship that is not based on extracting something from plants.
Wong completed her undergraduate studies at the Parsons School of Design in NYC and studied architectural design. She then went to Columbia to study architecture and ended up spending seven years working at a firm named Weiss/Manfredi, where she worked on a project in Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania that sparked her interest in the intersection of plants and architecture.
“I focus on different horticulture farms that produce tropical and semi-tropical species, the socio-political and environmental dimensions of those spaces,” Wong said. “I also look at how people invent new plants through breeding and mutation.”
A book by Christopher Stone entitled “Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects” inspired Wong because it asks whether plants have rights like humans do in a legal sense. The symposium is meant to raise questions about how plants, and the environment overall, are part of culture, Wong said.
Wong said she wanted to use the resources granted to her by her fellowship to break the mold of traditional symposiums. By changing the format and focusing on performance, she hopes to engage with students in different ways.
Though not every group presenting at the symposium, like Nocturnal Medicine or Cooking Sections, focuses on plants in specific, Wong said, they all look at transforming cultural engagement with the environment, especially climate change. She said that the main question being asked by the symposium is how plants can be viewed as more than “green stuff in the background.”
Arlo Stone | Digital Design Editor
For some presenters, screens projected videos on opposite sides of the room so that the audience was placed in the center of the presentation. For others, like artist and teacher Tim Simonds’ bleached parsley exhibit, the audience’s bodies themselves became the presentation.
Aiden Ackerman, a presenter and assistant professor at SUNY ESF, said that the Marble Room is itself a character in the presentation. He said that the location of the audience members directly in the center of the room blurs the lines between presenter and audience.
He added that holding the symposium in the architecture building makes sense, because plants can be elements of design. The presentations were conceptual and full of academic jargon, so the academic setting of the marble room helped facilitate their discussions. For Ackerman, the challenge was to figure out how to inhabit a room with work that typically sits on a screen.
Artist and presenter at the symposium, Michael Wang said that traditional symposiums could learn from the unconventional nature of “Pet Plants.” Engaging with the audience in new ways can make presentations have a deeper impact, he said.
“A regular conference is also a performance,” Wang said. “This one is more of an open invitation to decide how best to engage an audience.”
Simonds, whose bleached parsley performance was titled “We Make Temporary Vases,” said he’s taken part in other experimental symposia including one at Yale called “What Is Graphic Design Made of?”, and appreciated the different style of Wednesday’s symposium.
In Simonds’ performance, he and his fellow performers moved around the room and made shapes with their bodies, later being covered in plastic wrap and filled with water and parsley to highlight the bleached vegetables and how they are held in water.
“The intriguing part of it is that it’s a series of performances, rather than a series of lectures or a panel discussion based off of presenting each other’s work,” Simonds said.
Simonds intended his performance to present the conflict between caretaking and self interest. By putting themselves and their bodies in the position of taking care of something else, the performers’ movement becomes compromised, he added.
A speaker leads the audience in a guided meditation during a soundscape performance in “Chaos Blossoms.”
Courtesy of Max Walewski
Wong said the symposium overall is also about climate change advocacy, which she said is a concept that’s larger than life and hard to grapple with. Inspired by philosopher Bruno Latour, who said empathy is a major problem in climate change discourse, she decided bringing plants down to a personal level could help people enter that conversation.
Michelle Shofet represents Nocturnal Medicine, a nonprofit design studio that aims to build spiritual resiliency in the face of an ecological crisis. Shofet performed a piece entitled “Chaos Blossoms,” that began with a soundscape and a guided journey with a physical installation.
“We do this by creating live events and experiences and media that help people process and metabolize different aspects of climate change … in ways that are sensory,” Shofet said.
Shofet’s presentation focused on broader ecological relationships across species and how those have been scrambled by climate change. She hopes to create the opportunity for people to connect with phenomena in the natural world.
“The idea behind the project is that spring in a time of climate crisis is not just a season where new life blossoms and rebirth but it’s also a time of dysregulation and misalignment,” Shofet said.
Wang said he didn’t know what to expect when he walked into the symposium. He said it was fascinating to learn about how people are thinking about their own practices and how the vegetal world interacts with them.
He said that the overall message of his presentation revolves around the idea of the “Manifesto of Photosynthesism,” which he said was a call to action for artists and beyond to think about new ways to work with photosynthetic beings.
As an artist, Wang said the symposium relates to his work because it looks at the ways in which plants intersect with culture. It’s a way to focus on one aspect of the field and see what role plants can play in the art world, he said.
With her varied selection of presenters, Wong wanted to spark conversation in different fields about how to conceptualize plants, she said. Combining various speakers with an unconventional type of symposium helped her to achieve her goal.
“I can’t do this research without talking to a botanist, or anthropologist, or art history, or geography,” Wong said. “I wanted to try a new way to present information.”
