An experiment in communication between homosapiens & flora that will result in a united act of gardening across countries and time zones. A floriligeum remix of plant sentience to highlight how our green friends have seeded changes in our social history and behaviour.

Visit the project website for Transcontinental Garden Exchange.

Research threads promise an eclectic mixture of pure art-science; botanical metaphors and social commentary that will unfold as social intervention, science experiment, performance and media and from scientific, historical,  folkloric, fictional  and personal points of view.

Consider the immediate social effects of the work of Swedish botanist, * Carl Linnaeus, who is known to have identified plant sexuality and whose revelations had an unsettling affect on society at the time. He, too, made use of human-plant analogies.*  Women of the time who expressed this knowledge of sexuality through the feminine arts, were considered so provocative that many of their works of poetry, watercolour and needlepoint were banned.

Collaboratoring artists and expert botanists, create an environment where audience delegates, can communicate & interact with our green friends through “transcontinental gardening methodologies”.  Aided by local botanist teams, delegates participate in social interaction or direct communication with phyto-life of all kinds. Choose from a  range of interventions that might include photosynthetic exchange, assisted procreation,  germination of a seed in one ‘garden’ to bloom into new life in a networked garden, or exploring social mutations in contemporary flora, or the formation of an intimate inter-species relationship of your own.

*Above references: “Botany, sexuality and women’s writing 1760-1830”, by Sam George.

Research and development of this project is supported by the Australia Council for the arts through a Creative Australia Fellowship; [foam] (Belgium) and the Council of the City of Sydney.