An art and science panel curated by Dr Yvonne Volkart, Head of Research at the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the HGK Basel, in May 2024 at the Instituto Svizzero in Rome called for new forms of relationships between humans and plants.
In May 2024, a panel discussion entitled "Interspecies Love" with Monica Gagliano, Wanuri Kahiu and Bo Zheng took place at the Instituto Svizzero in Rome as part of the Kinship in Transformation event. The panel was curated and moderated by Dr Yvonne Volkart, Head of Research at the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the HGK Basel.
The idea of this art and science panel was to think of plants in a different way than the prevailing one; "love"––especially in its meaning as an affective and political force of subjectivation––was to help with this.
In our capitalist culture, plants are the silenced "other" that we humans use only for our own ends. Monica Gagliano says that we need to change our relations with plants: we need to shift from a relationship of ownership to one of guardianship and finally to one of non-hierarchical co-participation. In other words, if we want to change our culture of exploitation, we can start by understanding––and living––our relations with plants as relations of love.
Art and science are a good place for such experiments, of "kinship in transformation". The discussion made it clear that not only the works of Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi) and Zheng Bo (Le sacre du printemps), but also Monica Gagliano's scientific experiments attempt to mobilize political forces by means of unconditional love for the vegetal.
Yvonne Volkart's conversation with Zheng Bo is available as a video here.
The event "Kinship in Transformation" at the Instituto Svizzero in Rome invited artists and researchers from different disciplines and artistic practices to present their reflections and works and to develop alternative narratives about kinship and love that can open up new perspectives.
The panel discussion "Interspecies Love" was a cooperation between the Istituto Svizzero and the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) of the HGK Basel, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).