Plants and us - or eternal Plantroposcene?

25.Sept - 15.Nov. 2025.

Many of us are drawn to the fragrance and beauty of flowers, want to know their names, desire to own them, and often celebrate joyous occasions with flowers.

But plants also define our lives in many ways: they can be food, fuel, raw materials for making objects, medicine, or even substances used in ritual and spiritual practices. We could not exist without them.

Yet in the relationship between plants and humans, the latter is the dominant party. Man is the one who, in order to obtain food or to fulfil his desires, creates and then implements plans: by creating gardens, by farming, or in forests and aquatic plants: by collecting and sowing seeds, planting seedlings or thinning, even felling trees. But he also nurtures and protects plants, whether his goals are practical or cultic.

So much that in the experience of anthropologist Debbora Battaglia, we are creating whole worlds based on plants, ‘places where people and the techniques and magical activities they use are caught up in the spiral vortex of plant life.’

Gardens are the best place to do this, while they have also become cultural forms that reveal social positions, as well as our ideas about the world as a whole.

Plants, wherever they live, involve whole ecologies of other organisms, insects, birds, micro-organisms, in their rhythm of life, feeding them and forming interdependent relationships with them in which they serve their own development.

Their dynamics can also teach us important lessons about how human existence will evolve in these uncertain times. Plant systems are part of the water cycle, retaining water, and the shade of trees provides direct protection. Another indication of their importance is that the idea of the Planthroposcene (Natasha Myers) has been raised, both seriously and provocatively, in thinking about the Capitalocene, not only in terms of time but also in terms of the system of relationships that will open up new horizons for all living things.

In contemporary art, works refer to an increasing number of aspects of these situations, both in terms of present-day processes and utopian visions.

Erzsébet Pilinger, Budapest, July 2025.

More information soon!