The current pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to better understand the global impact of human relationships with plants and other animals. Layered and diverse histories of such relationships have brought us to an environmental tipping point. Equally diverse methodologies are required to stage an untangling of these multiple trajectories and identify pivotal nodes.
Multi-disciplinary enquiry along with platforms such as curatorship and artmaking, which enable polyphonic narratives to co-exist, hold much potential. We need, more than ever, a new view of the things that, as Simon Schaffer (2011) points out, ‘have always been done this way’. We need a deeper historical perspective of how we shape and have shaped knowledge, and we need to complicate our view of the objects that are familiar to us, but often strange to others.
The curatorial, because of its public-facing nature, allows for a new kind of academic ecology, and for the output of disciplinary environments (such as the hard sciences) to be translated and disseminated into new spaces and to diverse audiences. As such, it provides researchers with new opportunities to address their publics.
This exposition forms part of a larger research project, Planthology, currently being conducted at Uniarts.