How can we image and imagine a future of new vegetal beings and collective bodies in an ever ongoing post-apocalyptic world? How can we feel both the pain and pleasure of transformation already now? At the interface of care for plant beings and cure for plant humans, of photographic and photosynthetic exposure, of floral and faunal kingdoms, new kinships and vulnerable dependencies are in a state of becoming. Rather than going extinct or exit, the project argues for humans to co-exist and co-become with phyto-culture.
Cogito ergo Pisum operates as an open-ended project started in 2018, making a case for more-than-plant/less-than-human encounters and other symbiotic relationships between species. The urgent ecological crisis of our planet on one hand, and the need for substantial transformations of society at large on the other, are in grotesque asymmetrical shape. So are some of the disfigured patients and agents, beings and substances, caught in strange loops on the basis of horizontal gene transfer as an evolutionary concept.
Pisum Sativum used by Gregor Mendel in 1856 when discovering the laws of Mendelian inheritance, constitute a key organism in this project. In an attempt to become and think with plants, patients suffering from Epidermodysplasia verruciformis (Tree Man Syndrome), medieval foliate heads (Green men), cyanotypes of “Timo” the artist and ”Timo” the grey pea (NordGen NGB4018), all dwelling in a horizontal greenhouse, bestiarium, herbarium, solarium and darkroom.
The following works are part of a larger flora of objects related to Cogito ergo Pisum
