The heritage plants explicit the tradition, belief, history of the people as well as present the culture of intangible attributes of a group or society significant with the landscapes. Local people think that the plant character are equally essential to bring back the nostalgia of the traditional village garden. The study aim to identify the heritage plant characteristics to symbolize the townscape elements in establishing the place identity for the Royal Town of Kuala Kangsar, Perak, Malaysia as a case study. The study methodology involved a semi-structured interview with experts in three categories, namely, professionals, policymakers, and skilled practitioners. The results show that there is significance between the royal plants and the cultural heritage plants, which intend to be the townscape element’s identity of the royal town of Kuala Kangsar, Perak. The findings of the study expected to assist the city council in their town planning by proposing the heritage plants’ character images in enhancing the identity of the royal town of Kuala Kangsar. Besides, it could apply as a guideline for future developments in the Royal Town of Kuala Kangsar, Perak. Copy Right, IJAR, 2020,. All rights reserved
Cutler’s newest pieces focus particularly on the potted plant, a metaphor for the way we try to contain nature and present only the best version of it, and ourselves.
The fixity of plants has often been metaphorically used to visualize the essence of presumed human-fixity: to truly belong to one or another continent or land. To set roots in one place has long meant to live and develop a coherent life based on a commitment to one's own local customs and ideals. However, these rhetorical notions of fixity could not be more fictitious when applied to the versatility of real plants; how they can, sometimes very easily, spread across new geographical territories, often adapting to less than congenial climatic conditions. Plants are never static and focussing on the fixity of the individual, concentrating on plants’ ability to disperse and migrate might allow us to let go of erroneously naturalized conceptions that only really exist in the markedly human fear of the “other.”
“Plants are loaded, but also deeply personal,” explained Waldheim, who is also a professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. “Unlike other media of cultural production, we absorb them into our bodies, and that allows them different frequencies of meaning for us.”
Oldests inside roots were too stuck with soil, so it was not possibe to separate them, no matter how gently I haven't tried to separate roots, even the most young and strong ones broke,after rewatching the video I saw that for the "rotten" soil I used a plastic bag from my home country (Latvia) Duty-free
The process of root separation was difficult in a sense that I didn't want to heart the plant, but even a tiny action broke it.
Australian engineer and activist Natalie Jeremijenko has installed the site-specific The Declaration of Interdependence (2023), a living sculpture of flowering nasturtiums over text that recasts organisms’ fight for survival as instead a mutually beneficial effort that helps many more species. Embracing this scientific revelation, the work argues, will allow real progress in the environmental and sociopolitical threats we face today.
Natalie Jeremijenko, installation view of The Declaration of Interdependence, 2023, in “Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art” at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2023. © Natalie Jeremijenko. Photo © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
In this example, a potted plant takes on the role of the choreographed dancer. The rest of the performance introduces a cast of other domestic objects (mostly furniture) and a few people, but the first physically present subject is a plant. In internal activity it is between a human and a non-living object. It is transitional, a pathway between identification from a person to a thing.
Photo from “Esta Cuerpo Que Me Ocupa†by João Fiadeiro
In 1823 Philipp Franz von Siebold sailed under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to Japan, where he used his role as resident doctor and scientist at the Dejima trading post to amass a vast botanical collection. Among the species von Siebold introduced to Europe was Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica). Today considered a “non native invasive species” in places like the United Kingdom, the plant is now treated as a scourge. Alaa Abu Asad meditatively traces the violent, xenophobic speech used to describe the plant and its parallels in the language used to describe human migrants.
On a planet where ultimately very little is truly native, Abu Asad questions which plant species become accepted as the rightful inhabitants of nation states over time and which are forever relegated to the foreign. Tulips, though first imported to Holland from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, are today proudly claimed a national treasure. No such fate has met the Japanese knotweed. The plant remains pursued across countries and continents as every conceivable attempt is made to eradicate it.
Emotional state
Domesticated houseplants appear innocent, attractive, & defenseless, making them sympathetic individuals, while not fostering any theatrics or relying on sonic communication as an animal does. As a result of this, installations including plants do not always necessarily feel softened by the presence of plant life but can in fact occasionally alienate the viewer as though she were walking into a room of emotionless people. Still, they are more responsive & decisive than a mineral & their anthropomorphic qualities are obscure enough to free us from any social judgement of character from either subject or object.
Plants in contemporary art are always political in the sense that they relentlessly trouble anthropocentric certainties, parameters, and limitations. In so doing, they often implicitly invite radical perceptual shifts and deep reconsiderations of subject-object relations. Here lies the subversive power of plants. Artists, curators, and art historians who today take plants seriously are aware of their material recalcitrance; of how they trouble hegemonic conceptions of time, intelligence, movement, and identity; and of how considering plants from new and creative perspectives might also bear the potential to foster more sustainable futures.
Jorge Mayet's tree sculptures produced from paper, wire, fabric, and acrylic showcase the ways in which a tree’s roots often mimic the branches that sprout above ground. In these suspended works the underground systems are far more expansive than what appears above the earth, showing the viewer that what typically appears before us is only half of the real picture. Hanging from invisible wires, Mayet works are a conceptual connection to his own memories and roots growing up in Cuba, a visual metaphor for being uprooted from his home country.
