Plants are our fellow travelers: humans completely live on them. Before the background of the current wasting of the world, we need to rethink other ways – vegetal ways – of worlding: ways that do not consume the world, but (re)produce it.” — Yvonne Volkart
Suggesting that current research shows plants to be more complex beings than previously assumed, this year’s RIXC festival theme is developed in collaboration with Yvonne Volkart and her team’s four-year research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant, of the Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), which negotiates the discourse of plant intelligence across the natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts. The four-year research project explored the notion of intelligence and its intertwining with mind, consciousness, communication, memory, decision-making, learning, and subjectivity, asking whether such conceptualizations make sense of vegetal life and whether they promote new perspectives on interspecies and terrestrial relationships.
To explore these questions, the Plants_Intelligence team — including art theorist Yvonne Volkart as principal investigator, and artists Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smite — collaborated with partners in botany, plant ecology, seed and plant breeding, organic agriculture, food sovereignty, and Indigenous nations. While Argentina has circulated genetically modified seeds on a large scale since the 1990s, Switzerland has uniquely enshrined the dignity of the creature in its genetic engineering law. Drawing on laboratory experiments with plant decision-making, Indigenous plant–human alliances, and GMO-critical practices in South America, the team elaborates the im/possibilities of vegetal intelligence.
Felipe Castelblanco’s Plant Movements explores how plants communicate knowledge through medicine and agroecological models in the Andean-Amazon, where vegetal and human communities form alliances to sustain life and resist ecological threats. Julia Mensch’s Amaranth as Political Agent examines Argentina’s transgenic agriculture as a continuation of colonial terricide, highlighting Amaranth’s ecological agency as both a challenge to GM crops and a form of vegetal resistance. Rasa Smite’s Flower as Antenna and Attractor includes collaborations with Swiss breeding scientists at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) and explores how flowering plants sense and interpret light, resulting in a VR visualization created together with Raitis Smits.
Analyzing diverse artistic research case studies at the crossroads of vegetal knowledge across South–North and East–West regions, Yvonne Volkart develops Vegetal Theory, proposing that underestimated vegetal processes can be aesthetically experienced, generating genuinely new knowledge about plants through the concept of intelligence.
More info on Plants_Intelligence Research Project: https://plants-intelligence.ch/