AR June 2023: Plants
Plants are often restricted to the spaces that humans create for them—parks, gardens and other planted areas—and bent to profit or aesthetic preference. This issue calls for a paradigm shift beyond a change in material palettes. Where new buildings are justified, plants should be incorporated along with other low-carbon materials, but not without consideration of how that plant life is cultivated—all other forms of life depend on it.
“Plant sexual life becomes the subject of intense discussions in early modern botany. How does France, with its legacy of materialist libertine thought, become a hub for botanically-informed critique of human sexual norms and practices? How is early modern botany enmeshed with desire? Libertine Botany charts premodern explorations of the nonbinary sexuality of plants and investigates their effects on the gendering of the human polis. In conversation with contemporary discussions of sexuality, this special issue studies how—through a body of work anticipating queer politics, art, and ecology—the alien pleasures of plants give new contours to human experience.” l’esprit créateur
Interview with Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari
