tranzit.ro/ bucurești/ cluj/ iași/ sibiu/

The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Int. Primaverii no. 10, Silistea Snagovului village

*Event rescheduled from April 12

After more than 10 years since her first collaboration with tranzit.ro/Bucharest, artist Valentina Vetturi returns, this time in relation to Mimosa Pudica, her performative research on how learning about their memory with plants can inform principles of digital ecologies.

“At the core of this research are two questions that have fueled my artistic practice for over a decade: how do we remember and forget individually and as a society? And what remains of us when we no longer remember anything or if we remember too much? The movement, the space created between the experiences of forgetting and remembering, shapes the essence, the core of our mutating, hybrid, multiple identities as individuals and collectives. Over the years, I have sought answers to these questions in the persistence of music in human memory. I have looked at web technologies and the depths of their permanent records, and I have observed the fragile memory of papier-mâché dissolving in water. With Mimosa Pudica, I turn to the plant world. Inverting the human-centric perspective, I activate listening, observation, interaction, and learning practices with plants, questioning how they remember and if they forget. This individual listening phase alternates with discursive practices and shared experiences among plants and scholars from diverse disciplines and machines.

During the residency at the Station, we’ll observe some of the plants of the Cosmos Garden and invite a few Mimosa Pudica in the conversation. An ongoing observation in collaboration with tranzit.ro will begin in these days and last until September and maybe more. Parallelly, similar ongoing observations are running physically and remotely in Bari, London, and Hagen.

If the general aim of this long-term performative research is to question how we can learn with plants to interact with the techno-cosmos that shapes our daily lives and how we can forget (with) technology, the first step of Mimosa Pudica is to observe plants and create proximity, learn with them their language and movements, and observe how they remember and forget.”