The international symposium Plant Intelligence marks the conclusion of the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant (2022 – 2025). It brings together the artistic team of the project (Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smit) with research partners such as Birgit Schneider, Alexandra Toland, and Katja Tielbörger, theorists such as Giovanni Aloi, Michael Marder, and Jeremy Narby, as well as activists such as Florianne Koechlin, with a public audience.

Against the backdrop of the current wasting of the world, we must think of other ways—vegetal ways—of worlding: ways that do not consume the world, but re/produce it. Co-Composing it with plants, we cannot help but think and act with them and learn like them. Also, in the arts. In this symposium, theoretical, artistic, and experimental formats expand the discourse on plant intelligence and address, from an aesthetic and political perspective, how plants can be approached as intentional and cognizant beings.

The research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant with Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, Rasa Smite) is funded by the SNSF and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.

RIXC Art Science Festival

Plants Intelligence

2025 marks the 25th anniversary of RIXC Art Science Festival in Riga. This year’s edition will include the exhibition opening of Plants Intelligence and a broad program with a symposium and public keynotes by Noelia Billi, Jana Kukaine, and Yvonne Volkart, principal investigator of the SNSF-funded research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant of the HGK Basel FHWN, and co-curator of RIXC’s anniversary festival exhibition. The exhibition is conceptually and thematically developed in collaboration with Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant and will feature works by the artists involved in the research project: Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, Rasa Smite (with Raitis Smits). It will be complemented by other works exploring how underestimated vegetal processes can be aesthetically experienced, generating new knowledge about plants through the concept of intelligence, and will also include results of the collaboration with numerous partners, establishing South-North and East-West exchanges of vegetal mutual learning.

The symposium will feature presentations and discussion panels with the artists from Plants_Intelligence, alongside a diverse lineup of international contributors from Europe, the Nordic countries and Canada to South America and Asia who bring fresh global perspectives to the dialogue between art, science, and nature.

The research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant with Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, Rasa Smite) is funded by the SNSF and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.

Plants_Intelligence:
Towards a Vegetal Aesthetics

Insert #7

The seventh issue of the open access publication platform INSERT, entitled Plants_Intelligence: Towards a Vegetal Aesthetics, is edited by Yvonne Volkart. It includes contributions by numerous artists and authors who are looking for adequate artistic representations of plant life: Giovanni Aloi and Yvonne Volkart; Noelia Billi; Felipe Castelblanco, Ayênan Johnquinchoa Juajibioy and Nataliauribe Macías; Ursula Damm and Michaela Ott; Matthew Fuller; Julia Mensch; Cate Sandilands; and Rasa Smite.

The research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant with Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, Rasa Smite) is funded by the SNSF and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.

Plants_Intelligence

The artists assembled in the exhibition Plants_Intelligence share a passion for plants and their strategies, and situate them in an overarching context. By demonstrating that plants are active shapers of their modes of existence, we advocate recognition of another, more-than-human way of being. The presentation shows how art plays an important role in this process: already the regular and precise observation and translation of certain plants and their environments via drawing, video and other media is capable of heightening our ecological sensibilities. Beyond this, Plants_Intelligence also seeks to reclaim central aspects of life that have been expropriated by Neoliberalism, among them, attentiveness, growth, flexibility, intelligence or learning, and to render them tangible as fundamental aspects of relational existence.

The research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant with Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, Rasa Smite) is funded by the SNSF and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.

On Clouds and Trees

Two researchers with different backgrounds, theorist Yvonne Volkart and atmospheric scientist Lubna Dada, discuss the intelligence of plants and how we can communicate with them. How can we tell whether a forest is under stress? What do clouds and aerosols tell us? And how does art deal with this? The conversation suggests that, in parallel to investing in artificial intelligence, we should also improve our understanding of natural intelligence. It is  
part of the exhibition Technologien der Zukunft/Technologies of the Future. Vanessa Billy, Brodie Ellis, Paul Schatz at the Rehmann Museum and of the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant. 
 
Yvonne Volkart, Head of Research at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, initiated the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant on the intelligence of plants. She is the author of Technologies of Care. From Sensing Technologies to an Aesthetics of Attention in a More-than-Human World (Zurich 2023). 
 
Following studies in Lebanon and Finland, atmospheric scientist Lubna Dada is conducting research at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen. She explores the formation of clouds and the understanding of bioaerosols—such as pollen or tiny particles that form from plant scents in the air—and sees them as one of the ways how plants communicate.

Unter Pflanzen

The exhibition and the magazine Unter Pflanzen (English Among Plants) is a collaboration between the Museum Sinclair-Haus, Bad Homburg and the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant, lead by Yvonne Volkart, of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Unter Pflanzen, curated by Kathrin Meyer and Yvonne Volkart with Moritz Ohlig and Sophie Olivotto, marks the conclusion of the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant.

We are constantly moving “among plants,” yet we usually pass them by carelessly. The exhibition invites us to get to know our green companions in a new way—as active, sentient, acting, in short, intelligent beings. Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smite have been dedicating themselves to the artistic research into plant intelligence since 2022. Their works, alongside those of Ayënan Quinchoa Juajibioy and Ursula Damm, were created as part of the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant and will be presented for the first time in the exhibition Unter Pflanzen together with contributions of additional international artists. The works encourage us to perceive plants with all our senses and to be fascinated by their respective shapes, their abilities and their ways of populating the world.

For Plant Intelligence

The current hype around AI – which is basically just resource-intensive computing based on data mining and brute force – makes us forget that there exist completely different, much more “efficient” and pleasurable forms of intelligence: these are forms that are open to the multiplicity of being on earth, that create relations and playful forms of cross-species alliances. Plants in particular, these disregarded creatures, surprise us with their ingenious capacities to interact with their ecologies. This panel focuses on the question of how plants sense and compute, decide and act. What does that mean? What can humans learn from it? And why is this relevant for art, technology, science, and society?

The panel For Plant Intelligence @ Meshfestival will be accompanied by a workshop of the same name, which will take place on Friday 18 October and Saturday 19 October 2024 at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Interested people are welcome → registration and additional information

Interspecies Love

The narratives of kinship, love and networks of care are deeply rooted in the respective social structures and cultural systems. In the Western world and beyond, the definition and ideas of these concepts are closely tied to a capitalistic and heteronormative social structure that has furthered the maintenance of privileges for some, and the persistence of inequalities for others. The event Kinship In Transformation invites artists and researchers, coming from different disciplinary backgrounds and artistic practices, to share their reflections and work, opening to alternative narratives about kinship and love that can nourish fresh perspectives.

How can we think about kinship in new terms and acknowledge its myriad possible forms and always changing nature? And thinking beyond human relations, what can the realm of interspecies relations tell us?

The panel Interspecies Love is part of the event Kinship In Transformation. Interspecies Love is a cooperation of Istituto Svizzero and the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF.

Agency of Plants

In the current ecological crisis, which is also a social, psychological and political crisis, there is a growing realization that humans must connect and ally with non-human beings in new ways. In particular, plants—those beings long perceived as other, alien, immobile and passive—are gaining new attention. Not only do plants take care of human and non-human animals, traditional agricultural practices and recent botanic research show that plants have a profoundly rich sensorium: they speak, communicate, make decisions, are responsive and adaptive and help shape environmental conditions. In short, plants have agency, they have an “extended cognition” (as plant theorist Michael Marder has noted) and thus can be defined as intelligent and as “active” subjects.

What does this mean exactly? What does it mean that plants “have rights”? And what impact does this have in “our” dealings with, or rather in our coexistence with, plants?
The symposium Agency of Plants takes up these questions and examines them through various presentations and joint discussions.

Costs: Museum Admission
Registration is requested → kunstmuseum.li

Many thanks to Roman Kurzmeyer, Senior Lecturer at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, for preparing the participation of the students.

The symposium is made possible with a contribution from the H.E.M. Foundation, Vaduz.

A cooperation of the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and the Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation and the ETH’s Prints and Drawings Collection, Zurich

→ Flyer (pdf)

Parliament of Plants II

Plants_Intelligence.
Learning like a Plant

Plants_Intelligence. Learning like a Plant (2022–2025) is a new research project of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF for four years. The project led by Dr. Yvonne Volkart (Head of research at the Institute Art Gender Nature) asks from the perspective of art whether the recognition of vegetal forms of intelligence might lead to other methods of knowledge generation, coexistence, breeding and ultimately to new, “intelligent” forms of plant and agricultural culture?

In addition to Dr. Yvonne Volkart (project leader, vegetal thinking), the project team includes Dr. Felipe Castelblanco (postdoc, artistic research), Julia Mensch (PhD, artistic research) and Dr. Rasa Smite (artistic research).

The research partners of Plants_Intelligence. Learning like a Plant are proven experts in the discourse of plant intelligence. They are responsible for advising on content, methodology, and interdisciplinary discussion. The implementation of curatorial projects will be developed and realized with the cooperation partners. Partners in Switzerland are Dr. Monika Messmer (Deputy Head of Department of Crop Science, Group Lead Plant Breeding, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL Frick), Dr. Ines Goldbach (Director Kunsthaus Baselland) and Sabine Himmelsbach (Director HeK House of Electronic Arts, Basel). International partners include Hernando Chinoy (Legal Representant Indigenous Territorial Entity Atun Wasi Iuiai-AWAI, Inga Nation, CO), Prof. Ursula Damm (Head of the Media Environments chair, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, DE), Prof. Dr. Birgit Schneider (Professorship for Knowledge Cultures and Media Environments, Department of European Media Studies, University of Potsdam, DE), Prof. Dr. Katja Tielbörger (Head of Plant Ecology / Director Botanical Garden, University Tübingen, DE), Heraldo Vallejo (Legal Representant FUNDACION TIERRA DE SELVA y la comunidad NODO DE PENSAMIENTO ANDINOAMAZONICO, MUNICIPIO DE MOCOA, CO), Marcos Ezequiel Filardi (Director Museo del Hambre, Buenos Aires, AR), Kathrin Meyer (Director Museum Sinclair-Haus (Stiftung Kunst und Natur GmbH), Bad Homburg, DE) and Dr. Raitis Smits (Director Rixc, Riga, LV).