Let’s talk botany. The contemporary world, by orchestrating the material conditions of movement, facilitates our transplantations. Flowerpots, nurseries, greenhouses, open country. Is it only coincidence that modernism was from start to finish a tribute to the root? It was radical. In the course of the twentieth century, artistic (and political) manifestos appealed for a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification, with the aim of rediscovering their essence. It was a matter of cutting off useless branches, subtracting, eliminating, rebooting the world from a single master principle that was presented as the foundation of a liberating new language. Let us wager that our own century’s modernity will be invented precisely in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization. For contemporary creators are already laying the foundations for a radicant art - […] To be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them the power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing.
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, 2009 # 15
Let's talk Botany
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Entangled matters
This quote has been selected as part of one of the thematic collections of Alterlibrary, titled Entangled Matters.
In this collection, we gather inspirations that invite us to look beyond the boundaries separating nature and society, humans and non-humans, individuals and their environments. We explore how thought, knowledge and imagination emerge through networks of relationships and interdependencies — and what we might learn from thinking of societies as ecosystems.
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