„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 environments, 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.
Tellings of Time was a contribution to the annual SLSA conference (The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts) 2022, which was themed as “Reading Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, and the Reading Human" and held at Purdue University, US