Emily Drummer, Field Resistance (still), 2019. Courtesy the artist.
Radical Botany
Curated by Anya Ventura
LACE Screening Room
Download the Digital Program
Saturday, August 3, 2024, 2–5 PM
Philosophical Research Society
3910 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Limited free parking available on site
LACE Screening Room presents Radical Botany, curated by Anya Ventura. This film program engages with the idea of radical botany, defined by scholars Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari as when “plants are not just objects of manipulation but participants in the effort to imagine new worlds and to envision new futures.”
How do plants on film model intelligence and alterity, and offer new possibilities to imagine posthuman futures? The works in this program depict plants in laboratories, greenhouses, and field surveys subject to scientific, colonial, and capitalist modes of production while challenging how plants are represented, controlled, and reduced to mere specimens. Through experiments in language and visual perception that disrupt Western epistemologies, these artists attempt to give form to what might be called a plant consciousness. Plants are shown as active agents, vibrant vegetal life-forms that interact with humans in surprising, erotic, therapeutic, and horrific ways. How might the moving image exploring other-than-human ontologies, give rise to new ways of seeing and being-with plants? How might plants see back? Questioning habits of scientific scrutiny or pastoral romanticization, these works embrace the radical otherness of plants to reveal experimental ways of being in a time of ecological crisis.
Radical Botany features films by A.K. Burns, Karel Doing, Emily Drummer, Sky Hopinka, Jodie Mack, and Nancy Valladares. The program is followed by a discussion, moderated by Anya Ventura, with Antonia Szabari and Natania Meeker, authors of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction; botanist Peri Lee Pipkin, and artist Star Feliz. The event will also feature a Bouquet Bar prepared by Emily Alford from Muddy Heaven.
About the Curator
Anya Ventura is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Frieze, Art in America, and The Bafflwe, among others. She holds an MA in the Public Humanities from Brown University and an MFA in writing from the University of Iowa, where she was an Arts Fellow. Having previously held positions at MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology and Harvard’s Chinese Art Media Lab, she now works at the Getty Research Institute. She currently co-runs an experimental lecture series called Place Settings that occurs in unconventional locations around Los Angeles.
About the Artists
A.K. Burns is an artist and educator based in New York who utilizes a variety of art mediums such as video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and collaboration. Burns focuses on how various value systems intersect with the body, a place where socio-political issues are commonly negotiated and navigated.
Karel Doing is an independent artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose practice investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analogue and organic process, experiment, and co-creation. He has invented “phytography,” a technique that combines plants and photochemical emulsion.
Emily Drummer is a filmmaker who uses immersive research as a starting point to investigate the dynamic between technology and the natural world. She received her MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa and her BA from Hampshire College. She is a Princess Grace Film Honoraria recipient and a Flaherty Film Seminar fellow. Drummer’s work has been showcased by venues including Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Block Museum at Northwestern University, London Short Film Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, and Camden International Film Festival. Essays about her work have recently been published in Millennium Film Journal and the Brooklyn Rail.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) is an artist whose work revolves around video, photo, and text. His art references personal experiences relating to Indigenous land and environments, and how the complexities of language serve as vessels of culture conveyed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction media. His work has been displayed internationally in spaces such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, The Whitney Museum, and the Amon Carter Museum of Art. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from Portland State University and followed with a Master of Fine Arts in film, video, and new genres at the University of Wisconsin. Sky currently serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator and educator whose films examine the dynamic force of domestic and institutional remains to display the interplay between ornamentation and functionality. Her films surface the way humans add value to materialistic items. A current Professor at Dartmouth teaching Animation, she has presented solo shows at 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been included in publications such as Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema.
Nancy Dayanne Valladares is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator from Tegucigalpa, Honduras currently based in New York. Her practice closely examines photography’s historical entanglement with botanical imaginaries and chemical legacies. Nancy’s work grapples with the networks and flows of images-making paradigms and their accompanying technological regimes. Alongside artist Hsurae, Nancy is co-founder of Lythologies.org a decentralized research group interested in climate futures and new ecological imaginaries. Valladares currently teaches at the department of Design and Technology and Integrated Design at Parsons, the New School. She holds a Masters of Science from the program in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
About the Panelists
Antonia Szabari is a French and Comparative Literature Professor at USC with a Ph.D. from John Hopkins University. She is the author of three published works, Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France, focuses on elite satire, by examining its rise, which enhances our comprehension of printing and reading culture, the role of invectives, and discords in early modern French society; Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction from Early to Late Modernity, which explores a new way where plants envision their own futures; and Agents without Empire: Mobility and Race-Making in Sixteenth-Century France, on race-making in the 16th century employing diplomatic communications, religious texts, poetry, theatrical works, persuasive materials, and the natural world.
Natania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at USC. Her book-length projects include Voluptuous Philosophy (Fordham UP, 2006), on Lucretius and eighteenth-century materialisms; Radical Botany (co-authored with Antónia Szabari, Fordham UP, 2020), on plantlife and speculative fiction; and a recently completed manuscript prospectively entitled Illusion Without Error, on femininity and theories of matter in the Enlightenment. Together with Antónia Szabari, she coedited an issue of L’Esprit créateur on libertine botany. She is currently at work on a new book-length project on vegetal biopolitics and human sexuality, entitled Vegetal Materialisms and the History of Sex. This book seeks to expose the profound impact of vegetal life on the genealogy of human sex and sexuality.
Peri Lee Pipkin is a field botanist and biologist with dual bachelor’s degrees; a BFA in Ceramics and a BS in natural resources: ecology and botany from Oregon State University. Pipkin has traveled across the United States to work with institutions such as the Mojave Desert Network, the University of Idaho, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and the Montana Natural Heritage Program. Pipkin currently works as a Research Assistant at the California Botanic Garden. Interested in plant diversity and human intersections with the botanical kingdom, their continued work in botanical conservation connects with socio-environmental justice.
Star Feliz is a Dominican-American artist originally from New York, NY currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Building upon their ancestral Afro-Taino lineage of multi-dimensional healing, Feliz employs sound, sculpture, film, earthworks, and techniques of concealment, language, and mapping to transverse the psychic legacy of everyday resistance and world-making. Under the moniker of Priestusssy they create experimental devotional music. Feliz is also the plant spirit medicine healer and founder behind Botánica Cimarrón, a brand focused on bridging connections between people and the transformative healing power of nature. They have exhibited, performed, and presented commissions nationally and internationally. They are the author of When Eye Land (Printed Matter, 2023) and a contributor in the upcoming anthology Confluence of Witches: Celebrating our Lunar Roots, Decolonizing the Craft, and Re-enchanting Our World (Weiser Books, 2024).
Bouquet Bar by Emily Alford from Muddy Heaven Farm
Emily Alford (they/them) has worked as a farmer since 2014. In 2021, Emily and Kylie Obermeier began Muddy Heaven, an urban farm project, on a vacant lot with the supportive, digging hands of friends and family. Kylie and Emily facilitate youth programming that weaves together gardening, cooking, art and play. They host a summer camp, after school groups, and elementary school garden classes. After losing the lot, the farm has taken many forms, growing in yards and slivers of space that community members generously share. Now, Emily grows flowers at their home in Van Nuys for bouquet lovers and florists, and most importantly for local bees, butterflies and birds. @muddyheaven | muddyheaven.com
About the LACE Screening Room
The LACE Screening Room is a moving image series organized by LACE and curated by guest curators at Philosophical Research Society while LACE’s home on Hollywood Boulevard is under renovation. Click here for more information on LACE’s gallery. Support for the LACE Screening Room is provided by the Pasadena Art Alliance.
