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

该项目提供了对Maria Theresa Alves的艺术作品“变化的种子”（1999年至今）的仔细阅读。该作品将植物和种子视为殖民地历史的“无声见证”。我探索了这一主张的政治含义，发展了一个植物记忆的概念，该概念借鉴了土著宇宙论/本体论，植物认知研究以及艺术和文学实践，以调查非人类有机生命-特别是植物和种子-可以被视为不同类型记忆的代理人的提议。这样的作品介入了当代殖民主义的背景，在那里自然和植物被视为缺乏代理，因此被剥削。它允许与持续的殖民不公正进行接触，包括民族国家对历史叙事的霸权，例如通过将归还和赔偿工具化。我问植物是否允许另一种与政治问题的接触，即谁/什么被记住和从档案中遗漏。这个项目将自己置身于越来越多的关于环境危机、人类与植物和种子的关系以及艺术在环境人文学科中的作用的文献中。它是由两个主要研究问题驱动的：1。植物和种子怎么能被认为是记忆的媒介？根据伯纳德·斯蒂格勒（Bernard Stiegler）的记忆哲学，人类依赖于技术对象，这些技术对象提供了自身外部的组织系统，以保留有关过去的信息；因此，记忆很容易受到意识形态（即民族主义、新殖民主义）服务的操纵。与依赖于外部技术对象的记忆制度相反，植物记忆能否避开这种僵局，从而成为挑战人类叙事偏见的一种手段？我试图开发一个跨学科的框架来建立植物记忆的概念，其动机是政治问题：谁控制着记忆的内容？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压制策略的运作，非人类中心主义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.