In 2015, biologist and feminist theorist Donna Haraway declared, “No species, not even our own—this arrogant species that pretends to consist of good individuals in the so-called modern Western scripts—acts alone.” Almost ten years later, her text still seems relevant, given the awareness it brings about the joint effort that governs human and non-human relationships on Earth.
Haraway broadly advocates that we should establish kinship relations between beings of different species, thus creating networks of cooperation connecting humans, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc. Beings have ways of transforming the Planet that can be shared, learned, and exchanged.
In this sense, we can think that human technology—our set of techniques, skills, methods, and processes employed in transforming reality—can be combined with the ways of doing of other individuals, in a collaborative effort that aims at benefits for all. This initiative, common among various beings, could be better understood by us if we distanced ourselves from the predatory idea of total domination of our “kin.”
In this exhibition, JP Accacio addresses the collaborations—or the lack thereof—between humans and plants, thus constructing a dystopian scenario for the former in the face of the latter’s renewing potential for survival. Thus, computer carcasses and electronic equipment are incorporated by plants, in a “takeover” of nature over reality.
The obsolescence cycle of these devices is responsible for their own decay; therefore, plants only seize what is, by principle, abandoned and inert. In this encounter between beings, we glimpse poetic moments in which the term “vegetative,” commonly used to designate what has no self-awareness, is turned inside out, indicating the intelligence that seems to exist in the consistent, albeit immobile, existence of plants.
Among garden-cemeteries and columns, the artist articulates his vision of forest metamorphosis with photos, sculptures, objects, and site-specific arrangements with plants and electronic carcasses that silently take over the white cube, emulating the obstinate mode of persistence of our green kin. In this invasion, the artist is half-human, half-plant—the ANIMALVEGETAL—learning, understanding, and repeating the procedures of his “peers.”
