Growth
/
Planting Hypnos
/
Plant Growth Projections
„Any act of feeding is nothing other than a secret and invisible trading in sunlight, which - through these movements - travels from body to body, from species to species and kingdom to kingdom. From this point of view, all sowing is literally a sunset. … refashioning the world on the basis of the distribution of light.“ Emanuele Coccia. The Sower - On Contemporary Nature. 2019
In a response to the described relationship of light, species and environment, we would like to propose a tinkering of views: attempts of shared seeing, sensing, reading, touching, hearing together with a series of optic instruments . Inspired by the early Darwin experiment, tracing and projecting a plant’s movement onto a glass plate, setting markers for events such as rotation or orientation in time so to speak, we install microscopic projectors to enter in between the timings of plant expressions. Exhaust air, earth, skin, lenses, tendrils, elbows. “Tellings of Time” is conceived as a performance lecture that draws on gestural semiotics cultivated across beings through different resolutions and contaminations of time, referencing each other via light and scale. A cross-species mode of writing and translating, of becoming visible/readable and invisible/illegible for one another. A physical score, or threads of embodied patterns constructing possible „agro-ecological territories“, as Coccia calls the shared grounds of the sower, being sowed and light, to perceive, engender and retell a study of the modes of plant time.
We work with a bright orange light, more specifically with movement, direction, and color spectrum of a sodium vapor lamp. Photosynthesis requires a wavelength of approximately 650nm, which makes the sodium vapor lamp a suitable instrument for plant cultivation. Spaces lit with sodium vapor lamps, commonly applied in greenhouses before the advent of led lighting as well as in street traffic, are not only immersed in bright orange color, but also perceived monochromatically for the human eye. A parallel between plant growth and human attentiveness?
