Plants Don’t Have Legs: Interview with Nasrin Himada for Inflexions
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transmission: a botany of decolonization
2009
Transmission: A Botany of Decolonization is a prosthetic device that aspires to intervene into the trauma of colonial relations through immersive engagements with texts, sounds, and landscapes. Its presentation format combines video and audio recordings, live performance, and theoretical writing. Designed for Boston’s shoreline, an important historical site for both colonial encounter and militarization more generally, the prosthetic disrupts colonial epistemologies through a confusion of texts and sounds. Layered recordings of “The Ethics of Collecting” by Winona LaDuke and excerpts from Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide draw connections between the seeing, naming, and claiming of Western botany and archaeology and the ongoing violence of colonial power relations. Soundscapes from key points along Boston’s shoreline suggest that the trauma of colonial relations is shared by humans and nonhumans alike, and become extensions of our sensory apparatus that enable new ways of knowing.
Download the full text component of this project.
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not necessarily deeper
2009
Digging, Sowing, Tending, Harvesting (Bringing the War Home) is an ongoing series of research projects that work toward the development of a radical urban ecology. The actions of gardening are taken as both metaphors and methodologies in the pursuit of an expanded sense of ecology whose emphasis on ethical relationships between humans and the rest of the world forbids the forgetting of politics. This radical ecology must address the neoliberal stranglehold on life at its very roots, spread out through subjective, social and environmental levels of existence.
Not Necessarily Deeper is a three dimensional bibliography that you can dig into, installed at the Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery in May and June 2009. In relation to Digging, Sowing, Tending, Harvesting, it is both meta-project and site-specific manifestation of the metaphor of digging. Here, digging is first and foremost about research. This bibliography is made of books, but if you want to read them you’ve got to dig: behind the doors and walls of the gallery, through piles of storage. If you burrow all the way to the end of the gallery, amongst the dust and shelving you’ll find a window and chairs, and as you read there you may find that you are not further down or deeper in or anything of the sort, but actually in some entirely other outside.
This bibliography is highly idiosyncratic. It represents my research at its present state; some volumes I know well thanks to years of fruitful interaction, while others are new discoveries. In order to share the development of my methodology, I have organized the bibliography into sections, one each corresponding to digging, sowing, tending, and harvesting.
Download a print copy of the bibliography.
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the little dig
2009
A temporary non-monetary economy based on the exchange of dirt is performed in the shadow of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Inspired by two generations of libertarian communalist gardeners both called the Diggers (Britain, 1649-51; San Francisco, 1966-68), the performance establishes a grassroots infrastructure external to capitalist modes of production and exchange. A pile of free dirt excavated during a a home renovation in Peabody, MA is acquired using craigslist, an online bartering infrastructure. At the beginning of the work week, Monday May 11, the load of dirt is deposited on the Dewey Square Park lawn, across the street from the Fed. Over the course of the week, the soil is processed appropriately, according to its state upon arrival: nutrient and pH tests are conducted; coffee grounds from neighboring cafes are dug in as amendments; rocks are screened out. A public announcement, also diffused using craigslist, invites people to a giveaway of the remediated soil on Saturday May 16. The performance ends once all the dirt is taken away by a single gardener, to be added to a home vegetable garden in Boston’s South Shore.
Thanks for logistical support from the MIT Visual Arts Program, the BCA Mills Gallery, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and the MIT Insurance office. Partial funding provided by the MIT Council for the Arts.
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in case of flood
2008
“first attempt at distance empathy”
video project in collaboration with nika khanjani for the dare-dare event camping aux bons plaisirs fugaces in june 2008
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what kinds of questions do seeds ask?
2008
May 2005, installation view at Art Mûr
blue = Urtica dioica (Stinging nettle/Ortie)
purple = Salvia officinalis (Sage/Sauge)
pink = Achillea millefolium (Yarrow/Millefeuille)
yellow = Agastache foeniculum (Anise hyssop/Grande hysope)
green = Calendula officinalis (Calendula/Calendule)
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scatter
2007 – ongoing
Scatter is a garden full of nothing but weeds, start to finish. It is also a garden on the move: it began its life as a collection of seedlings in various homes., and since May 2007, it has been installed in the lot of an artist-run centre in Montreal, DARE-DARE.
Scatter is about travellings, the thickness of boundaries, and the aesthetics of care. Through the performance of traveling seeds and plants, Scatter actively demonstrates processes of transplantation, invasion, and assimilation, as well as affective relations between human and plant communities in the urban environment.
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how to go gently
(2006 – 2007)
How to Go Gently was first exhibited as a full-room installation in November 2006 as part of La Petite Mort d’Automne, a collaborative, one-night intervention in Montreal’s Ste. Elisabeth church. It was shown again for five days in May 2007 as part of a series of solo installation shows by emerging artists called Fences & Ladders, which took place in a historic shopfront, also in Montreal.
Five hundred milkweed seeds, suspended on white threads from the ceiling. Shifting and swaying with each small movement, it is a hyper-sensitive and responsive environment. The room is a breathless, instructive space, full of absences and calling for calm. At night, the room becomes a theatre for flashlight projections, with participants casting spidery shadows that shift and slide on the walls.
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transplants
2005
Transplants, a community teaching garden, consisted of 11 transplanted medicinal and/or edible “weeds,” arranged in a collection of found pots. For one week, transplants inhabited a small squatted lawn space, belonging to the historical Van Horne Warehouse, situated at the intersection of St. Laurent and Van Horne in Montreal’s Mile End.
Inspired by the habits of self-seeding plants, Transplants inhabited and transformed an underused urban space. The garden was designed to infect its visitors with an enthusiasm for their city, its neighborhoods and forgotten backwoods. Transplants was part of En-habitation, a larger collaborative event designed to explore personal relationships to socio-economic change in two residential Montreal neighborhoods.
