HERBARIUM

Encouraging attention towards so called “weeds”, we are extending our consciousness and care to those at the margins - to those that survive “despite”. The botanical project is closely linked to colonial histories - the “need” to classify and categorize extends from plants to humans into a hierarchy of kinds and is, therefore, writing a narrative of the world where everyone is placed - racially, sexually, environmentally.
Wild stories have the potential of un-making the anthropocentric scripts of classification (of humans, of animals, of plants). Learning from queer and decolonial practice and theory, the HERBARIUM offers a multitude of stories. If we follow the plants, what lines of flight might emerge? HERBARIUM can become a garden of mini-performances, each contributing to a wild collection of stories. A place to escape, to learn, to gather and to speculate, to mourn, to care, to photosynthesize.

this is an open-source concept! therefore, anyone who feels like entangling themselves with weeds and more-than-human memories, is warmly invited to create their own Herbarium entry. All research is openly shared on this page! Please feel free to get in touch with tonikritzer@gmail.com.

choose a plant. more precisely: a weed - a plant that grows in unexpected places.

what do you remember about this plant?

how do you interact with this plant normally?

how does the plant interact with you?

find a specimen. leave it where it is, but return regularly and look for it.

what do you share with this plant? search for commons.

weeds often have many names. how is this plant called - what names did we give it through the ages?

research the history of the plant from a human perspective.

how is this plant related to others?

look for what you cannot see - bacterias, fungi, insects. These were the friends, the family, the enemies of this plant.

the sanskrit root of the word "herb" means: nourishment, food. who eats this plant?

think of the landscapes the plant remembers.

try to describe the plant like you would describe a friend.

your perspective is anthropocentric. We are not here to change that. We are here to find ways of translation.

allow your research, your process, to grow in all directions.

stay open for unexpected encounters with this project, everywhere you go.

carefully archive every material you work with.

create assemblages in the space to practice relating to the more-than-human.

lay in the light. imagine how it feels like to photosynthesize.

examine the color, the structure, the chemistry of the plant closely. imagine immersion in these textures. if you can find a way, really immerse yourself.

at the end of each rehearsal, take 30 minutes to write a letter to the plant you chose. tell them about your day - your experiences.

if ideas pop up, don't weed them out immediately. stay abundant.

allow this performance to grow on its own.

if it is possible within your schedule, try only to rehearse during daylight - and in rooms that let the light in.

try to let go of notions of efficiency. tune into the rhythms of the plants: they move slower than humans.

you can try to begin every rehearsal with moving slowly.

if possible, rehearse at least once in the natural environment of the plant you chose.

make your plant a photo album of all you think it remembers. a small zine is a wonderful start.

let the work cross-contaminate with other works, with your life and other lifes.

4. the stinging nettle

think of the seasons the plant remembers the most, think of seasons of bloom and procreation...

if your plant has flowers, ask: how sexy are those? why?

This serves as a library in progress, of inspiration and enriching ideas of many others...

"The category of "wild"is useful (...) because it offers a critique of systems of classification, (...), while also calling attention to a larger climate and environmental context within which the efforts of classification emerged in the first place. Classification was a botanical project, strongly linked to colonialism in the 18th century, that involved colonial travellers looking at flora, fauna and peoples, taking notes, extracting plant life and writing a narrative of the world, in which everything was placed (...). Given that as a sort of civilizational script, "wildness" has the potential to unmake, unwrite, unthink that script."

(future ecologies podcast, "queer ecologies")

"I must confess to full-blown chlorophyll envy. Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just my being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun. The shadowly hemlocks and the waving grasses are spinning out sugar molecules and passing them onto hungry mouths and mandibles, all the while listening to the warblers and watching the light dance on the water. It would be so satisfying to provide for the well-being of others. Like being a parent again, like being needed. Shade, medicine, berries, roots, there would be no end to it. As a plant, I could make the campfire, hold the nest, heal the wound, fill the brimming pot. But this generosity is beyond my realm, as I am a mere heterotroph, a feeder on the carbon transmuted by others. In order to live, I must consume. That's the way the world works.

(Robin Wall Kimmerer, "The democracy of species").

"Sometimes we can see the ghosts of relentless waste and manufactured poverty in the form of stinking garbage and toxic waste. But there are also ghosts we cannot see and those we choose to forget. They don't sit still. They leave traces, they disturb our plans. They crack through pavements."

(Anna Tsing, "The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet")

These are the first few notes I took during my research!

"Ever since the Enlightenment, western philosophers have shown us a nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human. (...) The time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles. Without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back to life (...). No longer relegated to whispers in the night, such stories might be simultaneously true and fabulous. How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?"

(Anna Tsing, The mushroom at the end of the world)

NATURE IS A MUSEUM. ECOLOGY IS EVERYTHING.

I used this meditation often before I began my rehearsals...

write a poem to your plant. read it to your plant.

care: bring water when you visit the plant, and if it is blooming season: collect seeds and help the weed spread.

HERBARIUM shifts the viewpoint: rather than archiving plants from a human perspective, born out of the need to classify and bring order, HERBARIUM asks how plant's archives could look like. How - and what - do plants remember? Different performance artists collaborate with specific plants to imagine these plant stories. In a non-curated series of short solos (or duets?), the HERBARIUM performance series is growing rhizomatically, spreading like weeds.

Hello! If you are making your own entry to the herbarium, it would be wonderful if you could add it here! it’s easy: here is a link to a demo of the website builder: https://www.hotglue.org/

To edit, you just use this link: tonikritzer.hotglue.me/edit - the password is myherbarium, the username is tonikritzer. It would be wonderful if you create a small peek on this start page, and if you’d like to, create your own extra page to link to. How to add another page is also explained in the little tutorial. If you need any help or have questions, don’t hesistate to mail me: tonikritzer@gmail.com. I’m looking forward to seeing your work!

"All names fall short of the shining of things".

With the field bindweed, I think of language and communication - following the voices of the plants and discovering that they are much more expressive than we believe. I wonder how to speak of these photosynthetic, blooming companions, and how to speak with them.

Whose voices are listened to, who gets to speak? We seek out the edges of plant domestication, the unruly noise in the soil. We try to imagine a poetics of loud plants.

Performance artist: Toni Kritzer

..For every project I claim only half of the credit. The other half belongs to plants and friends. They sculpt and play. I live and breathe. Many of us in the art world have long abandoned the “genius” trope invented by 16th-century writer Giorgio Vasari. Now it is time for one further step: to abandon the creationist myth of art-making. We are not created by God, and we do not create like God. Without trees, spiders, and whales, we would never be able to make art. We are inspired by patterns, stories, and ideas that originate in the complex and beautiful web of life on this planet.
In 2016, a botanist took me to a forest on the edge of Taipei, where scientists like him study ferns. Since then I have been going there every year to make one short ecosexual film. I look forward to this annual ritual because the air in the forest is so invigorating. Half awake, we usually go up the hill in the early morning. Once in the forest, bathing in the sea of oxygen and phytoncides, our bodies and minds reach a heightened level of agility and attentiveness. Plants reveal to us the full potential of a three-dimensional space. Massive bird’s-nest ferns perch on trees. Tiny moss blanket rocks. The light is dramatic, the sound rich, and the aroma intense. The assemblage has a distinct style, yet is constantly changing. This forest is better than any artwork I could ever make, and better than any exhibition I have ever seen.

(Zheng Bo, Art as multispecies vibrancy)

use your whole sensorium.

PLANT STARING as a tactic: at least for half an hour.

Taste and smell the plant. Allow the plant to taste and smell you back.

Practice listening. Both auditory and otherwise.

I would love to think with you about communities, multi-species imaginations about being-together. To gather collectively as a way of existing, to be response-able for the creatures around us. I want to ask you about community structures, vegetable democracies, and how you feel about communism. I want to ask you about the life after the revolution, if there ever was one, about how it feels to grow in patches of Utopia in disturbed worlds. What is your world-making project? What kind of world can we build?

And, all the while discussing the world that we dream about and the one we are subjected to, we had arrived at the spot in the shady lane where the wild thyme begs one to come have a rest." - George Sand

"Intimacy does not require recognition, but describes a creative engagement..." (Astrid Schrader)
- meaning that you will stay strangers, but that does not pose a threat to care and intimacy.

"Participation also means sharing, and so we will have to give up something. For instance, the idea of a completely controllable and “manageable” environment. All life forms inhabiting the planet influence each other in complex ways that are neither fully understood nor controllable. This also means welcoming “unintended landscapes” as encounters with nature, landscapes that have not been created or designed with a purpose. Such enclaves of disorder are habitats for unexpected forms of sociality. The “wild commons” of urban nature are, in a sense, “the spatial equivalent of free time: a sphere of existence” that has not yet been leveled by the bulldozer of profit maximization and swallowed by extended reproduction. Cohabitation does not prove that another world is possible, but that a thousand other worlds exist."
(...)
Cohabitation, on the other hand, means “living with”—something that is not always pleasant, innocent, beautiful, or free of danger. “Living with” fosters the development of neighborhoods, which are the opposite of gated communities, because neighbors are beings whose presence we did not choose. It includes complicity with plants, even those considered weeds, which grow on the side of the road and elsewhere. Plants are the pillars of the world; with their bodies and metabolism they hold the earth down and the sky up. Without them there would be no cities, no people or animals.
Cohabitation requires rethinking the political. The term polis originally referred to two things: the religious and administrative center of the ancient city-state, and the collective citizenry that gathered there. For as long as the term has existed, the political has been defined in Western thought traditions as a place to which neither plants, animals, slaves, nor women have access, “but in which only free anthropodes may hang around, in that know-it-all style of theirs, while the others toil away at the margins, or are eaten wholesale.”The promise of cohabitation is: The walls of the polis have fallen. Let us begin to build with its ruins a new city for all.

(Fahim Amir, Manifesto for Arch+ magazine, Nr.247)

The term ruderal comes from rudus, the Latin term for rubble. A common term in urban ecology, it refers to communities that emerge spontaneously in disturbed environments usually considered hostile to life: the cracks of sidewalks, the spaces alongside train tracks and roads, industrial sites, waste disposal areas, or rubble fields (...). Neither wild nor domesticated, ruderal communities depend on what is known as an “edge effect” and the juxtaposition of contrasting environments in one ecosystem. (...) The ruderal perspective I offer draws on ruins and infrastructure as conceptual devices to further undo the nature–culture divide in anthropological scholarship. While examining what it means to live with ruins, it pushes a ruin framework further by theorizing the urban and life in the rubble of nationalism and racial inequality. A ruderal lens thus combines an analysis of ruins and their emerging ecologies with questions of urban social justice.

(Bettina Stoetzner, RUDERAL ECOLOGIES: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin)

embrace clumsy anthropomorphism in your attempts to relate.

find a way to introduce yourself to the plant!

note: in the spirit of an open-source concept, I am sharing .pdfs of books here. However, I want to encourage you to buy these books at your local bookshop in order to pay fairly the fantastic work of the authors.

Anna Tsing - THE BUCK, THE BULL, AND THE DREAM OF THE STAG: SOME UNEXPECTED WEEDS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Emanuele Coccia - THE LIFE OF PLANTS

each edition of the HERBARIUM is a collaboration between one artist and one plant, that can be considered a weed. The pieces bear witness to attempts at relating across interspecies impossibilities, embrace unlikely resemblances and trace plants through their entanglements with human histories. Layered forms of storytelling are emerging, blending the poetic and scientific growing towards an “ecological intimacy”.

The nettle, the first to pop up on abandoned places, protecting the otherwise possibilities of life.

this is a zine I made for a workshop given at DAS Arts. If you have access to a printer, I highly recommend to print it out - on one page - and fold it into a booklet. Here is a tutorial on how to do so: https://www.rookiemag.com/2012/05/how-to-make-a-zine/

"it is not the lush herb garden in back
that brings me the closest to the kin,
nor the scraggly oak savanna hugging
the great river, alas not even the verdant
conifer forests of the north were i
hear the voice of plants loudest, instead
they converse with me at the edges.

i heed the call of the forgotten
urban wilderness, desecrated zones
where messages from protective
patches of nettle communicate with
guttural screams of the train horn,
where queen anne's lace waves from
the side of the highway, billowy
white tendrils arcing gracefully,
as if to cover the roadside litter

weeds make their presence known
to dignified in concrete - walks to walls,
plants born in brownfields thrive
despite toxic pasts, present
live in refusal - human notions of
not ideal, unliveable, the mess we
made now tended to by fungi,
graced with yarrow's wish to heal

for i am an edgewalker, in ever awe
of these robust beings, tending to
the liminal - spaces of the unsung,
unseen plant friends who hold us
and though i honor the work of the
witches who farm, garden, weave and
wildcraft - truth be told i am not them

rather, i stroll with death and witness
human horrors on the land, on ourselves
i bow down to botanical resilience. i weep
at the sight of mullein standing tall,
stately. i trust dandelion, a true comrade
and agitator. so i leave offerings with them,
at the railyard, near the rust - at the
cutthroat crossroads of the anthropocene"

(An ode to the plant path - Corrin Turkovich)