Rooted Hauntology Lab

Rooted Hauntology Co-working Lab is a research trajectory looking at the (im)possibility of collaboration between humans and plants.

Through engaging in a co-working practice with about 25 photosynthetic colleagues, including decorative exotic plants, carnivorous plants and plain kitchen herbs, we investigate what sharing a working space with these plants can mean and what kind of relating we can initiate beyond gardening or an exploitative aesthetic objectification. What are the politics of our relations to these potted, decorative, commodified beings? How can a co-working practice evoke care, observation, attunement and being-with plant-others. Can we find a generative potential in the impossibility to bridge our difference in being? Can looking into the abyss of our radical otherness provide an antidote to the over-romanticizing of nature and allow us to discover ways of relating that acknowledge this otherness and work with it rather then try to ignore it?

Co-working with plants challenges our sense of time. The more time we spend with them, the more our timelines seem to break open. There is a haunting that happens - traces of past and future can be found in the now. The attunement to the presence of ghosts, our own spectrality and that of plant others can provide an alternative to the melancholia for lost futures in the anthropocene. Through haunting, both the past, future and the non-human can reterritorialize the present and help us imagine and act differently.

This trajectory started as part of Ingrid Vranken's Master studies in expanded curation at DAStheatre (Amsterdam) and includes multiple publications, workshops, presentations, artist commissions and a looooooong public moments.

Additonal info can also be found here: https://rooted-hauntology.tumblr.com/

And an article recently got published here (Dutch!): https://www.rektoverso.be/artikel/situaties-met-kamerplanten