Plant Spirit, 2021-2023

A video installation project, in collaboration with Yota Ayaan,  exhibited as part of Plant Data, at Galeria da Biodiversidade, Centro Ciência Viva, Porto and Human is a Cosmic Plant, at Galerie Frappant, Hamburg.

The four recorded talks are centred on the speakers personal experiences and insights of connecting, and building long-standing relation, with plant spirits. Each speaker offers unique and enchanting stories that honour the sacred bond they share with plants and the spirit kingdom. It was a revelation to sit and listen, and to soak up the atmosphere of their words.

The video installation, Plant Spirit, was part of a larger multimedia sound and video exhibit in the form of a home office within an illuminated greenhouse structure. The central focus is a laptop that plays the video recordings of the four speakers: Miguel Rivera (community ritual leader), Monica Gagliano (researcher and evolutionary ecologist), Mark Jensen (herbalist and qi gong teacher) and Roxanne Swentzell (indigenous food activist).

Duration 1:04:00

   "To share about plants, is sometimes to just say that it’s alive. It’s all alive.
I can remember in my first moments of crossing that threshold from a kind of western allopathic based practitioner into that green world. 
   At first, and I’m sure you know this, it’s almost utterly overwhelming. Because you suddenly realise that we’re this one little arrogant upstart species, you know, and we’re surrounded by a vibrant, alive, interactive matrix of life. That’s been here for hundreds of millions of years. And we’ve been lost in our thoughts. We’ve been lost in this misguided sense of superiority. And this way that has lead us to a profound sense of separation. 
   In a sense we need to honour the findings of contemporary botany and phytochemistry. We need to honour the folklore and traditional use of medicinal plants. We need to honour the indigenous teachings of plants. But there is this other section of that wheel that involves the dreaming place. It involves that place we call spirit. That place were we find ourselves touched and moved by our encounter with a plant. By an other than human part of the natural world."

– extract of Mark Jensen for Plant Spirit

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