Plants & People (2011)
Installation for the Anniversary Party, Eastern Bloc, Montréal, QC
Plants & People explored how fieldwork, sampling, and informal laboratory practices shape the ways we investigate and interpret living systems. The installation combined a working wet-lab with a series of plant-based archives, drawing attention to the subjective and often improvisational nature of classification. Samples were named according to place-based associations rather than scientific conventions, disrupting hierarchical modes of ordering and emphasizing relational ways of knowing.
The laboratory environment itself was assembled from second-hand glassware and simple DIY tools, foregrounding process over precision. Throughout the event, participants engaged in performative tours that traced speculative trajectories between terrestrial plant life and imagined extraterrestrial habitats. Activities included collage using living tissues, basic tissue culture propagation demonstrations, and experiments with chlorophyll as a communicative or expressive medium.
In this project, archiving became an open-ended, participatory practice, less about stabilizing knowledge and more about expanding how plants and people might be understood in relation to one another across environments, technologies, and speculative futures.