Vegetalienalia, as part of Good Grief Studio’s 2023 Dark MOFO presentation: Histories. With: ARCHIE MOORE, AMOS GEBHARDT, KATE GECK.

How does our articulation of the past impact the present? Move through a landscape of unearthly sculptures, identity symbols, video documents of decolonisation, and cinematic slices of life as four diverse artists respond to notions of what has come before. - Good Grief Studios

The twin strobes of plant ‘consciousness’ and imminent global catastrophe have long created a tension around the vegetal, the-more-than-human, philosophy and the future. Popular culture uses speculative science fiction, fantasy and horror as a means to both descant, and ignore mounting eschatological terror. I am drawn to the unreal, unimaginable, the weird and eerie, and provocative ideas that emerge from experimental investigations and other possible worlds, to describe these tensions. 

While mining the polyvalent discourse of retro - speculative science fiction as a course of research, I am frequently encountering histories of the future that are being realised in the present, prompting me to look further and further back into ecological, human and spiritual pasts that have become prophetic in their tales and truths. The vegetal world is ancient and continuing, it is past, present and future, and it is a vocal signifier of what has been and what is to come. ‘Weeds’, plants out of place, have an immutable loquacity in the knowledge they hold of the capitalocene, and clairvoyant schematic narratives of where we are headed.  

- Betty Russ