Living Art: vegetal agencies and trans-specific co-creations in contemporary art

Abstract

Based on the analysis of contemporary artistic creations that explore multispecies dimensions and trans-specific collaborations between humans and plants, this project aims to study the transits of concepts, knowledge and practices between art, science and anthropology. The main objective of the research is to investigate the "creative contaminations" between artistic and scientific domains (the anthropological there included) from the renewed use that artists have made of plants in their creations, removing them from the condition of medium or material and conceiving them as active agents in the production of artworks, in accordance with anthropological perspectives and procedures, especially the so-called "vegetal turn". Based on an ethnographic approach, the analysis will focus on the works and creative processes of three current Latin American artists, who work directly with living plants, namely: Aniara Rodado (Colombia), Guto Nóbrega (Brazil) and Ximena Garrido-Lecca (Peru). Drawing on theoretical-methodological discussions about urgent environmental problems raised by the Anthropocene and the destruction of human and non-human worlds, the research intends to understand specific ways of overlapping between artistic creation and the creation of worlds, that put into suspicion the boundaries between art, science and politics. It intends to shed light on the two-way relationships between the arts and sciences (artists using methods and theories and also providing subsidies for theoretical reflection), which will undoubtedly have yields for a broader understanding of these new forms of expression in the field of the arts and for expanding interlocutions in the field of anthropological theory.