A Botany of History: Plants, Seeds and Philosophies of Memory

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This project offers a close reading of the artwork 'Seeds of Change' (1999-ongoing) by Maria Theresa Alves. The work posits plants and seeds as "silent witnesses" to a colonial past. I explore the political implications of this claim, developing a concept of plant memory that draws on indigenous cosmologies/ontologies, research into plant cognition, as well as art and literary practices, to investigate the proposal that non-human organic life-specifically plants and seeds-can be considered agents of different kinds of memory.Such work intervenes in the context of contemporary coloniality where nature and plants are seen as devoid of agency, thus exploitable. It allows for an engagement with ongoing colonial injustices, including nation states' hegemony over historical narratives, for instance by the instrumentalisation of restitution and reparations. I ask whether plants allow for an alternative engagement with the political question of who/what is remembered and omitted from the archive.This project situates itself within a growing body of literature on environmental crises and human relationships to plants and seeds, as well as the role of art in the environmental humanities. It is driven by two principal research questions:1. How can plants and seeds be considered as agents of memory?2. According to Bernard Stiegler's philosophy of memory, humans are dependent on technical objects which provide systems of organisation external to themselves in order to retain information about the past; thus memory is vulnerable to manipulation in the service of ideology (i.e. nationalist, neo-colonial). Can plant memory, as opposed to a regime of memory dependent on external, technical objects, evade such an impasse and thereby become a means of challenging human narrative bias?I seek to develop an interdisciplinary framework for establishing a concept of plant memory, motivated by the political questions: Who is in control of what is remembered? How do different ontologies of memory constitute different modes of politics? Here the potential for non-anthropocentric witnesses becomes crucial as new and continued strategies of obfuscation and repression operate.