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

这个项目提供了一个密切阅读的艺术作品“变化的种子”（1999年至今）由玛丽亚特蕾莎阿尔维斯。这部作品将植物和种子作为殖民地过去的“沉默见证者”。我探讨了这一主张的政治含义，发展了一个植物记忆的概念，借鉴了土著宇宙论/本体论，对植物认知的研究，以及艺术和文学实践，去调查非人类的有机生命--特别是植物和种子--可以被认为是不同类型记忆的代理人。这样的工作介入了当代殖民主义的背景下，自然和植物被视为缺乏#36825;的机构，因此可以利用。它允许参与持续的殖民不公正，包括民族国家对历史叙述的霸权，例如通过恢复原状和赔偿的工具化。我问植物是否允许另一种参与的政治问题，谁/什么是记住和从档案中删除。这个项目本身定位在一个越来越多的文学机构的环境危机和人类的关系，植物和种子，以及艺术在环境人文的作用。它是由两个主要的研究问题驱动的：1。植物和种子如何被认为是记忆的媒介？2.根据伯纳德·斯蒂格勒的记忆哲学，人类依赖于提供外部组织系统的技术对象，以保留有关过去的信息;因此，记忆容易受到意识形态（即民族主义，新殖民主义）的操纵。与依赖于外部技术对象的记忆制度相反，植物记忆能否摆脱这种僵局，从而成为挑战人类叙事偏见的一种手段？我试图建立一个跨学科的框架，建立一个概念的植物记忆，政治问题的动机：谁是在控制什么是记住？不同的记忆本体论如何构成不同的政治模式？在这里，随着新的和持续的混淆和镇压战略的实施，非以种族为中心的证人的潜力变得至关重要。

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.