Follow the Plants

Follow the Plants expands from an experimental exchange initiated by Madeleine Collie and developed in dialogue with Yvonne Billimore that situates artists practices within and among creative lives of plants. The process invites eighteen artists across Americas, Australia, Asia, Europe and South Africa to rethink cultural practices through collaborations with plants, as growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings that shape the places they inhabit. Through the project artists are invited to share their long term durational and complex research practices with another artist. Each artist opens up their approaches and ways of thinking, making and learning alongside the movements of plants, people and practices of kinship across territories.

Follow the Plants is the result of a slow practice of curatorial and artistic research which began with the formation of the Food Art Research Network that has explored how our worlds share an interconnected metabolism. The projects exchanged rethink not only the environmental impact of settler societies but the forces of monopoly commerce, plantation logics and resource extraction on the lively socialites of plant-human communities. It is an exercise in carefully metabolising each other’s research, to learn how to think the world through another’s questions and to practise sharing custodianship of collective knowledge.

“Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)

Follow the Plants is initiated and curated by Madeleine Collie with curatorial associate Yvonne Billimore.