How do we honour the profound interrelation between plants, people, and the planet?

How do we process alienation and grief? How do we (re)build connection? This is an acknowledgement I want to feel the dirt beneath my fingernails. I want to be engaged with the messy reality of entangled life. Through art-making, gardening, and archiving, I experience feelings of enchantment while acknowledging the deep grief of what we are currently witnessing and experiencing. My art navigates how to be alive with the pain and beauty of being in this moment. In writing about dirt beneath my fingernails I think about interconnection, inheritance and implications of my art-making, actions and engagement with the world.

I also think about how we might move from a plantationocene towards a planthropocene, as a spell of imagination towards collective liberation(s). This is an explicit acknowledgement of the histories and realities of violence, consumption and alienation that have created the systems, behaviour and culture found where I live in Amsterdam (and England sometimes too). It is a hopeful dream of an interconnected future acknowledging the possibilities that exist thanks to the living more-than-human world all around us. It is a direction inspired by desire.