Let’s Slip a Moist Flax Seed into a Soil is an exhibition devoted to the sprouting of a community of queer people and plants. It is also a tale about expanding the imagination and sensitivity in the face of changing living conditions on the planet.
In Liliana Zeic’s narrative, a common ground between queer and plant worlds is found in a broad spectrum of representations of the marginal and the non-heteronormative: weirdos, minorities, outcasts, weeds, natural curiosities, illnesses. Blossoming on the margins are new, interspecies forms of life and untamed beauty. Noncanonical voices resound in reaction to the climate stress, they embed cognition in sentient bodies (The One Who Looks at the Sky).
A series of wooden panels created using the technique of intarsia interweaves plant motifs with images of human bodies, queer polymorphous communities, seed collectors, mysterious rituals. In these works, the artist addresses and queers the traditions of biomorphism, that is the history of modelling social organisations on organic forms and processes occurring in living organisms. The blotched material used in intarsia is burr, widely employed in furniture decoration. Burr develops in the natural world as a tree growth resulting from the swell of a trunk infected by viruses, fungi, or suffering from damage or a genetic defect. An injury activates tissue that cicatrises the trunk by gradually widening growth rings, forming bulbous protrusions and transforming wood fibre layout in a way desired in intarsia. Coded in burr patterns, the traces of plant’s illness and self-regeneration are liberated by Zeic from their prior decorative function. Now, their characteristics enhance her representations of non- normative worlds, doing away with social divisions between what’s “healthy”/”natural” and “unnatural”/”pathological”. Her intarsia pieces result from the artist’s lengthy, handicraft work. This process gives resonance to and transforms her personal experiences of her parents’ carpentry workshop and growing up in the Polish countryside.
Motifs of human-plant configurations recurring in Zeic’s intarsia works resonate with traces – also shown in the exhibition – of processes initiated during her residency at the Utopia Home – International Empathy Centre in Nowa Huta. Her artistic research and workshop sessions
were inspired by synanthropic plants growing wild on the roof of the institution and in its vicinity. Adapted to areas heavily transformed by humans, such species grow beyond greenery management systems. St John’s wort, tansy, prickly lettuce, common mugwort, downy hempnettle spread in degraded areas, on roadsides, near rubbish dumps, railway tracks, on wasteland. They live independently from human aesthetic and consumer needs. During her residency, the artist invited interested individuals to conduct experimental group processes with plants. Their documentation offers an insight into the experience of one – human – side. It provides a record of exercises in observing specific plants, attempts to learn from their movement, growth, regeneration processes, ways of feeling and communicating. Opening up to new sensations was fostered by deep mindfulness practices. These helped broaden the spectrum of feelings by experiencing the physicality of one’s own body in relation to non-human bodies.
Following the invitation to put imagination to work, queer communities become potential allies of the plant world when they experiment with expanding sensitivity, also on an interspecies level. At the intersection of human and botanical bodies Zeic discovers a space for regeneration and embedding new tales of resilience, co-existence, and survival in a degraded environment.
text: Joanna Sokołowska
phot. Bartosz Górka
