Recent searches
Search options
We're delighted to announce the publication from Open Humanities Press of Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales, edited by Prudence Gibson, Sigi Jottkandt, Marie Sierra and Anna Westbrook.
Available in open access and print:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/dark-botany/
Dark Botany activates the material and sensorial wonder of plants. In this Wunderkammer of critical plant studies essays and plant+artworks, the herbarium emerges as a site of multiple materialities and reflexive forms of counter-narrative. Herbaria specimens come alive as assemblages, telling truths about their dark histories and darker contemporary currents, while reflecting on the complexity of texture, movement, memory, compound structure, chemical emissions and rapid evolution of plants and languages. What one discovers is that herbaria are not static: they are as vital, energetic and enigmatic as the plants in their collections.
Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales is an Open Humanities Press Labs Seedbook:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/labs/seedbooks/
It is also part of The Herbarium Tales.
This is a plant studies Australian Research Council Linkage project 2020-23, and a collaboration between University of NSW, Bundanon Trust and the Sydney Botanic Gardens Herbarium.
The project outputs will include three films, two major outdoor artworks, a living book, a city forest, a monograph called The Herbarium and Me and this network of people and plants. The project team is dedicated to redefining the ways plants are understood and valued, and also to deepening recognition and understanding of the ways plants are important actors in political, economic and social relations.
They hope to celebrate and interrogate the agency, in/inter-dependence, and performing subjectivities of plants; they also hope to develop critical understandings of plants as performing actors in bio/phyto-political relations.