Invasibility, Movement, and Agency

Exploring Plant-Human Relationships in the Plantationocene

Abstract

This sound walk invites participants to listen to a mix of texts, sounds and songs that explore plant-human relationships, while guiding them on a walk through an urban or rural environment of their choice. The walk aims to reveal the ways in which our relationships with plants, in the era of the Plantationocene, are still guided by the logic of the plantation. This is particularly evident in damaged and simplified ecosystems, where human and more than human labour is violently monetised to create ‘cheap nature’ (Moore and Patel 2018) through intensive and monocultural agricultural and horticultural practices (Barua 2023). The walk also prompts participants to seek out plants whose growth is ‘wild’ or ‘out of place’ in that they have not been intentionally planted by humans, or are considered alien or invasive to the place where they are growing. Banu Subramaniam (2014) argues that ‘like human immigrants, alien plant and animals are seen as “other,”’ with ‘colonial and racist narratives of dirt, disease, and hygiene’ present in the ways in which human and plant immigrants are characterised (231). This in turn creates a logic of ‘invasibility’, which is applied to humans and plants and has been used throughout history to separate ‘the human and nonhuman bodies into those that belonged and those that were considered invasive’ (Kirbis 2020, 837). In relation to the plants they encounter, participants are prompted to consider ‘vegetal agency’ in relation to human wants and needs, specifically what labour the plant is doing on whose behalf and under what conditions. The experience reveals damaging colonial legacies that persist for plants, people, and the relations between them through felt, material engagements with vegetal growth. It also offers prompts for forming different relationships with plants, focusing on principles of right relation and reciprocity, practised by Indigenous peoples across the world.