Vegetal Agency and Contemporary Art: Towards Sustainable Relationships with a More-Than-Human World

Recently, in Latvian contemporary arts, a variety of plant-based works of art emerged, confirming that artists and society are eager to engage and explore vegetal motives. This cultural phenomenon needs to be addressed adequately, using proper vocabulary, as well as theoretical frameworks that capture its aesthetic and political significance, including the potential to communicate difficult truths about clime crises, decaying ecosystems, and capitalist-driven environmental devastations. The account of vegetal agency is especially useful – it delineates the multiple ways plants affect, shape, and participate in human lives, as well as testifies to their agentic power to fashion, commit, and influence a more-than-human world. Recognizing the agency of plants is crucial for challenging the prevailing paradigm in Western thought, where plants conventionally are described as inferior, undeveloped, passive, undifferentiated, and mute. Building new relationships with plants, which metonymically stand for nature in general, amounts to decentering the human perspective, withdrawing from an anthropocentric worldview, and introducing a radically new conceptualization of nature. The project explores how the transition to a more sustainable human-nature relationship is mediated and facilitated by contemporary art. While art cannot save the planet, it can relate, critique, actively engage, and play imaginatively on the problem to suggest novel ways of caring for our planetary home.