Super Natural

Without plants there would be no us.

Plants and other photosynthetic species like algae created Earth’s unique atmosphere and regulate today’s climate. Plants are crucial for biodiversity, not to mention our dependence on them for food, fuel, medicine, clothing, materials…

Many plants depend on animals, including us, for their pollination, seed dispersal and evolution of genetic diversity. Yet many people today, including entire global industries, exploit and abuse plants as if their wellbeing is of no consequence. Conversely, our ancestors and the majority of today’s indigenous cultures deeply value and respect plants, just as they value and respect all other life on Earth.

Super Natural reflects on how our relationship with plants, despite being co-dependent, is varied, multi-faceted and ever-evolving, examines the systems and structures that have shaped it over time and imagines what it could look like in the future.

“Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water...and then they give it away!” Robin Wall Kimmerer. Writer, botanist and Citizen of the Potawatomi Nation.

All life on Earth is interconnected; energy and materials flow between living beings in endless cycles. Whether through senses and signals or carbon, oxygen and water, invisible threads connect a complex, dynamic web of life – and we are all a part of this web. Today, however some cultures have become separated from nature, both in language and in action, and appear to consider humans as supra natural – beyond nature – when in fact humans, like all life on Earth, are just really, really (as in, super) natural. For many, the connection to nature appears to have been extinguished, lost, forgotten or ignored. Super Natural explores how this connection can be re-made through thinking about our connection to plants.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” John Muir, 1838-1914. Naturalist, author and environmental philosopher.

People all around the world learn about their environment – nature – in different ways. Many indigenous peoples still live a largely subsistence lifestyle, and express and nurture a close, respectful, and often spiritual connection to their local, natural environment. Their ever-evolving, traditional ecological knowledge has been handed down through generations often in the form of story and folklore, leading to actions that are often described as intuitive and knowledge that is often described as tacit.

Modern science, on the other hand, aims to observe the natural world in an unbiased manner to generate evidence and fact, and has often separated species in order to study them thoroughly. Holistic science and the emerging field of Systems Science recognises the benefit of looking at living beings as components of complex, interconnected ecosystems that include humans.

Super Natural encourages us to see the value in both pathways to ecological knowledge, and to reunite tacit knowledge with scientific knowledge.

“Perhaps the single most important thing we can do to undo the harm we have done is to fix firmly in our minds the thought: the Earth is alive.” James Lovelock 1919-2022. Environmentalist, scientist, and originator of Gaia Theory.

During the colonial era, and markedly that which began in the 14th century, the beliefs and practices of indigenous, first nation and tribal peoples were often violently suppressed. Over time, with the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions, they were further diminished and dominated by empirical and human-centric thinking and the drive for economic growth, capitalism and consumerism. More and more, plants became viewed as resources to be exploited, leading to behaviour that has been devastating to nature and in turn, to our own wellbeing.

Super Natural looks to the past as well as the future to explore and imagine how different narratives about plants and about human-plant relationships can be remembered and re-written.

“When we see harm come to the rainforest, it is as if a part of our own body has been hurt. It feels like an illness that rises up in us and needs to be cured.” Nixiwaka Yawanawá. Amazon Indian, member of the Yawanawá tribe.

4k video, 21:12 min, and installation with totem and mandrake
Video commissioned by Screen City Biennial with the support of Cecilia Brunson Projects A Wellcome Collection and La Casa Encendida commission, in partnership with Delfina Foundation Hologram design: Álvaro Muñoz

Patricia Domínguez’s work brings together experimental research on ethnobotany, healing practices and the commercialisation of wellbeing. Matrix Vegetal – a new video work presented within a futuristic totem – examines some of these themes as well as focussing in on South American quantum thinking, dream fiction and organic connection technologies.

As part of the research for this project, Domínguez spent a month as an apprentice with Amador Aniceto, a healer and curandero (traditional healer) living and practicing in Madre de Dios, Peru. Under his guidance, the artist was able to learn how to activate an intimate process of connecting with the vegetal world – both in terms of knowledge and language.

Domínguez’s aim was to achieve a temporary disengagement from the “digital matrix”, activating instead an alliance with plants and the vegetal matrix. Through patience and a focus on the present moment she was able to establish a connection with the ‘more-than-human’ language of the Earth.

The totem in which the video is displayed includes a specimen of mandrake. Domínguez is highlighting and honouring indigenous knowledge on healing and nurturing the living world. Mandrake, or Mandragora, have been known in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa since ancient times. They have sedative and anaesthetic properties and were used by women healers to increase fertility and to ease childbirth – practices that were deemed witchcraft by the Christian Church. With its inclusion, the artist is honouring pre-Columbian symbolic knowledge and vision, aiming to expand our understanding and perception of both the vegetal and the spiritual worlds.

Freeing the Potato from its Scientific and Colonial Ties, 2022
Video, 10 min

Iman Datoo’s practice both examines and wonders about the evolution of our botanical landscapes through world-making and storytelling. Primarily working with mapmaking, sculpture and film, she explores the role of tacit knowledge in decentralising narratives about plants and articulating alternative futures with our non-human counterparts.

Kinnomic Botany sets out a vision of a parallel botanical world through the ‘eyes’ of a potato. Entered through a clay pot, the landscape makes visual a system of mapping that encompasses what has long been lost from the potato’s history, while offering new pathways to connect with the plant world through personal and tacit experience.

Now it is time to re(remember)
I am more than my tuber.
I am my seed,
my flower,
my fruits,
my roots.

The 2022 version of this work was made possible with support from the Eden Project.

Cast iron, 173 x 396 x 288 cm

Ai Weiwei's Roots works are a series of monumental sculptural works in iron, cast from giant tree roots sourced in Brazil. Working with local artisans and communities across Brazil, Ai visited Trancoso in the east to locate roots and trunks from the endangered Pequi Vinagreiro tree, typically found in the Bahian rainforest. Elements of these rare tree roots, some of which could be over a thousand years old, were painstakingly moulded, conjoined and then cast to create striking compositions and bold forms that reflect their Brazilian heritage.

The work – a tangible depiction of ‘uprootedness’ - is one that mirrors not only the artist’s peripatetic existence after being allowed to leave China in 2015, but also the plight of the refugees he has spent the last few years documenting, as well as the indigenous populations that rely on the trees and forests of Brazil for their habitats and sustenance. The ideas of deforestation and concomitant purges of peoples and resources relates to previous bodies of work by the artist as well as to the current political realities of many countries, including his native China.

The cast iron material used - covered in a patina of orange rust – references ancient cultures and man’s first tools for tree felling and woodworking. Although originally contorted by their surrounding landscapes, these roots were not born of nature but made and crafted by human hands, using the ancient techniques of ‘lost wax’ moulding and then iron casting. These methods represent a traditional, largely bygone way of life that has been usurped and upended by industrialisation and relentless modernisation, illustrating how progress can often come at the expense of cultural and societal well-being.

© Ai Weiwei; Courtesy of the Artist and Lisson Gallery

24 drawings on biodegradable envelopes, each 76 x 57cm
Originally commissioned by Wellcome Collection and La Casa Encendida, in partnership with Delfina Foundation

Eduardo Navarro creates sensory and perceptual experiences that aim to radically transform our sense of self and otherness. Photosynthetics (Fotosintéticos) is a series of expansive and contemplative drawings, created in charcoal, that depict part-human, part-plant beings. Hand drawn on biodegradable envelopes they each contain a London plane tree seed. It is the artist’s intention that at the end of the work’s exhibitable life, the envelopes will be placed in an open landscape so that the seeds in their “biodegradable wombs” may be returned to the soil.

In this work, Navarro presents us with his own intuitive belief systems, and proposes that we consider ourselves part of the subject matter of the artwork. He invites us to contemplate whether it might be possible to communicate with a tree, and to meditate on how this is only conceivable if we are first able to consider how that tree might speak to the wind, the clouds and the passage of time. Through this experience we are being asked to question what makes us human and who or what we should be looking to for an answer.

“I think the experience of my work should work beyond the mind, like becoming a horse, dancing with clouds, eating a drawing or a hearing flower. How can my proposals create a new language and allow us to speak to the uncertain?”

Audio, read by Monica Gagliano, 7:29 min
Originally commissioned by Wellcome Collection and La Casa Encendida, in partnership with Delfina Foundation

“You are in an endless state of communion and infinite contemplation with other natural elements and beings. Can you see with your skin and hear with your arms? Can you think together with the air and the sun and the soil?”

Eduardo Navarro’s work is an exploration of contemplation, non-human entities, play and symbiosis. Vegetal Transmutation builds upon these themes to create an immersive and meditative audio piece that invites us to reconnect with our somatic awareness, allowing ourselves to disconnected from rational thought.

The work invokes a set of instructions, written in collaboration with philosopher and author of Plant Thinking, Michael Marder and read by Monica Gagliano. It encourages listeners to both communicate with and learn from plants.

Please take a set of headphones, listen, and use these performative instructions to explore the works within this show as a plant might.

Textile, silk, glue and dye, dimensions variable

A Great Seaweed Day by Swedish artist Ingela Ihrman, investigates the tangible and metaphysical links between the ideas of intestinal and marine flora - a multi-part project that embraces Ihrman’s love of swimming in the sea.

A Great Seaweed Day is also a quote from the diary of the Victorian housewife and marine botanist Margaret Gatty (1809-1873). Gatty's interest in seaweed was sparked when, aged 39, she travelled to the coast to recover from physical exhaustion caused by the latest of seven strenuous pregnancies. Gatty (who would give birth three more times) spent the rest of her life combining motherhood with a scientific career in marine botany and a large passion for seaweed. Most of the pages of her diary are filled with entries relating to family dinners, visits and other aspects of the life of a high-society woman. On some dates, however, she would write simply, “A GREAT SEAWEED DAY”.

Ihrman followed in Gatty’s footsteps and spent time by the sea – on the Isle of Eigg in Scotland, the Koster Islands at the West coast of Sweden and in her home town of Malmö. Walking among what had been swept up by storms and the tide, or while taking a swim, her eyes and fingers were drawn to the many slimy and glittering pieces of algae that she encountered.

Ulva Intestinalis is a thin, almost transparent, tubular green algae, commonly known as ‘mermaid’s necklace’ or ‘gut weed’. The artist has used this to create a link between intestinal flora and the flora of the sea – a slippery path that connects a human’s living body with the body of the ocean.

Bronze, acrylic and steel, 180 x 230cm

Process, hybridity, and materiality are important strands in the practice of Kedisha Coakley and ones that often begin with a personal investigation into childhood memories, ritualistic practices and their universal signification.

The work exhibited, under the title of Horticultural Appropriation (a booklet of the same name published by Claire Ratinon & Sam Ayre in 2021), is an archive of memories and experiences through botanical and natural objects curated as a ‘cabinet of curiosities.’ Some, such as volcanic rock and salt crystals, have been gathered by the artist, whilst others such as passionfruit and lychee form part of her daily ritual. Together they are an investigation into the idea of repatriating knowledges and untold stories, personal experience and legacy. Through this work Coakley is inviting us to question what remains - and what is lost - when botanical objects are removed from their native and indigenous lands. Can a type of reparation for these less tangible objects take place?

The artist’s research was largely focused on the history of the breadfruit, a large starchy fruit that originated in the Malay Archipelago and is widely grown in Jamaica. Researching at both Kew Gardens and the Eden Project, Coakley has been looking at how botanical specimens came into existence in these spaces, their connection with the British Empire, and the ways in which they have been documented, archived and categorised.

The resulting sculptures act as an intersection for the mapping of stories, locations, cultural experiences and spiritual beliefs. Using a method of colliding, Coakley is bringing together multicultural meanings, a connection to the British Empire, and real-life experiences, tracing - through the natural object – a sense of rootedness and a passing down of knowledge through tradition.

Objects: Passion fruit, sharon fruit, lychee, tamarind, cotton pod, acorn, oyster shells, volcanic rock, feather, dead sea salt crystals, shells, drift wood, beach rocks.

• Animate Earth, Stephan Harding 
• Gaia Alchemy: The Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul, Stephan Harding 
• Gaia, James Lovelock  
• Soul, Soil, Society: a New Trinity for our Time Satish Kumar 
• The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram
• From What Is to What If, Rob Hopkins

• Plant Thinking, Michael Marder 
• This Book is a Plant, Sheila Watt-Cloutier 
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall-Kimmerer 

• Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard 
• The Secret Network of Nature, Peter Wohlleben  
• Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake 

• Regenesis, George Monbiot 
• Regeneration, Paul Hawken  
• The Well Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart Smith 
• Biomimiccry, Janine M Benyus 
• Wilding, Isabella Tree 

• Black Bodies, White Gold, Anna Arabindan-Kesson 
• Horticultural Appropriation: Why Horticulture Needs Decolonising, Claire Ratinon and Sam Ayre 
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall-Kimmerer 

• Donut Economics, Kate Raworth 
• The Social Instinct, Nichola Raihani 

• The Overstory, Richard Powers