STUTTGART.- As the reality of the Anthropocene draws attention to the hubris of human agency, it has raised previously neglected – or even repressed – questions regarding other-than-human agency, including the political and artistic agency of vegetal life. The question is no longer (as it was even a few years ago) whether plants, crops and forests make complex communal decisions regarding the strategies they will collectively implement with respect to changing conditions, but rather how that collective decision-making works and what it feels like. Humans, when called upon to take political decisions with respect to their environment, will typically take one or perhaps two factors into account – to consider further factors becomes exponentially more complex. Forests, on the other hand, factor in everything; although the biorhythm of trees is incommensurate with that of humans (for whom trees often appear as immobile statues rather than lively dancers, the way they must seem to lichen or moss) they cannot but take all factors into account. Such is one of the mainstays of Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo’s long and contemplative video installation, filmed in Grumsin, an ancient beech forest in Brandenburg and one of Germany’s UNESCO World Heritage sites, indicatively entitled The Political Life of Plants (2021-23). The title doesn’t beat around the bush: plants are political agents whose political and aesthetic action is self-documenting within the eco-cycle that sustains it.

This visually compelling, conceptually fascinating, two-part film installation – drawing cinematic inspiration from Soviet vanguard cinema of a century ago, and featuring discussions between the artist and leading ecologists and plant neurobiologists, including plant adaptation specialist Roosa Laitinen and soil-ecologist Matthias Rillig, overheard but barely seen through the greenery of the trees – considers the life-sustaining processes of forests both from a biological and (above all) political perspective. How do forests deliberate? How do they achieve consensus, and manage dissensus? How do they prioritize different factors in decision making? What are the timeframes for implementing decisions once taken? Because the film’s starting point is not (as is all too often the case) whether forests have political agency, but rather how that agency plays out, and how we can learn from trees, the experience of the film is irreversibly transformative.

Alongside the film installation, a sequence of eight sets of drawings of plants from Zheng Bo’s ongoing Drawing Life series is the quintessence of the atmosphere to which it appropriately lends its name. Every day, the artist leaves his home on rural corner of Lantau Island in greater Hong Kong with a 6B pencil and a sheet of paper to document, graphically, the foliage, plants and other vegetation that share his surroundings – developing his sensitivity and understanding of their rich political life, without any pretention to speak in their stead. The subtle drawings are arranged on tables according to “solar terms,” in keeping with the traditional East-Asian lunisolar farming calendar, each term made up of a set of between 14 and 16 drawings, depending on the number of days. The drawings are placed under glass on wooden planks set on rough-hewn stones on the floor, inviting visitors to the atmosphere to kneel on cushions to look more closely at the work and perhaps join the artist’s embodied contemplation of his plant neighbors.

This atmosphere of plants-political, very much in alignment with the ongoing artistic programming at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, focusing on an ecosystemic and expanded-farming approach to art and its usership, is conceived to take the watchword, Farm Everything!, a step further, considering that ultimately the political life of plants might be something like this: that the best farmer is always a plant, for it both requires a habitat and provides one for others.