Mimosa Pudica. On Plants Memory
Artist Valentina Vetturi in conversation with horticultural engineer Maria Raicu
Mimosa Pudica. On Plants Memory
Artist Valentina Vetturi in conversation with horticultural engineer Maria Raicu
Saturday, 18 October 2025, 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
The Botanical Garden in Bucharest
Sos. Cotroceni 32, sector 6, Bucharest
"Mimosa Pudica is an ongoing performative research, funded by the Italian Council dedicated to the study of memory across vegetal and digital ecologies. The main research question is how studying alongside plants about their memory could inform principles of digital ecologies.
The project began from the daily observation of a Mimosa pudica plant—known for folding its leaves when touched, and for its ability to “learn” from experience. This simple gesture of withdrawal and reopening, as well as the plant's daily existence, became a site of attention, a way to question how we consider the vegetal world and how remembering and forgetting operate in plants.
The choice of the Mimosa pudica is connected to the pioneering experiments of ecologist Monica Gagliano, who demonstrated that plants can acquire and retain behavioural memories. While the research departs from a strictly scientific approach, it translates observation into a performative practice that listens to the plant’s temporalities, gestures, and perception. The study examines how vegetal forms of memory—chemical, cellular, and epigenetic—may inspire alternative models for understanding how information, learning, and transmission occur.
Mimosa Pudica has been developing through collaboration and alliances with plants and scholars from a heterogeneous field of knowledge.
While at the Station for Research on Art and Life, Mimosa pudica plants have been growing since last April, and I’ve been engaging in dialogue with various scholars.
Together with Plant Physiologist Cetta Di Pinto (University of Bari), since this summer, I’ve been exploring how epigenetic memory, as a mode of inscription and transformation, works: how traces of experience can be written into living matter and reactivated over time.
Parallel to this, a series of conversations developed in roundtables and workshops with Federica Giardini, Delio Mugnolo, Vlad Morariu, and Marco Armiero, bridging philosophy, mathematics, artistic research, and environmental humanities in the research field. Across public formats—lecture-performances, collective readings, roundtables, and discussions—the studio laboratory is extended into shared spaces of reflection, where knowledge emerges through relationship and listening.
From this observational core, Mimosa Pudica expands toward the digital. It examines how computational systems, like vegetal ones, store, process, and forget information—how they “learn” through repetition, exposure, and erasure. By placing a sensitive plant beside the infrastructures of artificial intelligence and data, the project invites us to question what constitutes intelligence, agency, and memory in an age of algorithmic acceleration.
Each iteration of Mimosa Pudica—from the studio to the roundtables and lectures—functions as an interface where different epistemologies meet. Observation becomes dialogue; research becomes performance; the vegetal reorients the digital mirror with its capacities to sense, adapt, and remember." (Valentina Vetturi)
To know more about Mimosa Pudica:
www.valentinavetturi.com/portfolio/mimosa-pudica
Valentina Vetturi is a researcher and visual artist working at the intersection of performance, writing, new media and transdisciplinary research. Currently based in Bari, Italy, her work explores themes such as memory, digital ecologies. Her practice is influenced by open-source methodologies, foster decentralized knowledge networks, and develops through long performative research that often finds the ongoing structure or reconfiguration as the open form best suited to the context-specific processuality of her work. Vetturi won the Italian Council research grant in 2024 and she collaborates with institutions like Lagos Biennial (2024), Museo MAXXI Roma (2024, 2021,2014), Strauhof Zurich (2016). In addition to her artistic practice, Vetturi actively transmits artistic knowledge through lectures and workshops at educational and cultural institutions internationally. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Bari.
Mimosa Pudica is a research project by Valentina Vetturi granted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.
This event is supported by the Italian Cultural Institute Bucharest.
