Playing with Plants

Playing with Plants Courtney Ryan Theatre Journal, Volume 65, Number 3, October 2013, pp. 335-353 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0069 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/summary/v065/65.3.ryan.html Access provided by UCLA Library (2 Nov 2013 21:36 GMT) Playing with Plants Courtney Ryan Verdant grass ills a shopping cart pushed down a residential street. A leashed box of cacti is taken out for a walk. Moss in a glass dome rests on a human head. These images, conceived by contemporary performance and installation artist Vaughn Bell, uproot plants from their expected place—the store, the garden, the greenhouse, the windowsill—and reimagine them in motion. Bell’s performance pieces feature plants “out of place”—plants on the move throughout busy urbanscapes, plants simultaneously rooted in soil and uprooted from ixed locations. Performing what I call “transplantment,” Bell’s pieces quite literally traverse the spatial demarcations of private/public, “nature”/culture, and plant/animal/human.1 In motion or prepared for movement, the plants perform material crossings throughout the city that inspire theoretical crossings as well. Through the transplantment of plants and place, Bell both critiques the taxonomic marginalization of plants and performs an alternate ecology in which plants and people are inter-embodied. Reimagining their socio-spatial relationship to each other, Bell signals an innovative engagement between urban plants and people and, with it, a new form of interspecies performance. Introduction As much as Bell’s pieces create a new kind of interspecies performance, they also resonate within existing interspecies theory, itself a burgeoning form that emphasizes interconnectivity among disparate species. Although the term “interspecies” inevitably maintains species’ divisions, it simultaneously erodes categorization through an emphasis on liminality. The inter- implies that species are both between each other and in in-between states. As Julie Livingston and Jasbir Puar recently posited, “interspecies,” in contrast to posthumanism or animal studies, “offers a broader geopolitical understanding of how the human/animal/plant triad is unstable and varies across Courtney Ryan is a PhD candidate in theatre and performance studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has an article in The World’s a Stage: Performance on Behalf of the Environment, edited by Richard Besel and Jnan Blau (forthcoming). Her dissertation is on nineteenth- through twenty-first-century ecological theatre, performance art, and film that stage interactions between humans and nonhumans. Many thanks to Ric Knowles and the anonymous readers of Theatre Journal for their insightful suggestions. 1 Throughout, I have placed the word “nature” within scare quotes in order to emphasize its construction. This construction is of particular importance to Bell’s work, which mocks human notions of “nature,” even as it stages material engagements with plants and their environments. Theatre Journal 65 (2013) 335–353 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 336 / Courtney Ryan time and space.”2 The term emphasizes spatiotemporal relationships between and among species, stressing reciprocality over hierarchy. Similarly, interspecies performance seeks to change species’ relationships to one another through performance. It focuses on the act or process of shifting relationships, and the ways in which performance can strengthen and facilitate such relationships. Insomuch as Bell’s pieces stage highly spatialized encounters between lora and fauna, they speak to the recent theoretical turn to interspecies performance. At the same time, since Bell’s work primarily focuses on vegetal life, it is important to acknowledge this distinction, as my use of transplantment attempts to do. Because Bell’s pieces emphasize the portability and mobility of plants in the city, the preix trans-, which implies constant crossing, is more applicable than the preix inter-, which suggests an in-between state. That said, transplantment still operates as an interspecies performance and thus not only draws on nascent interspecies theory, but also on its theoretical predecessors— animal studies, thing theory, and ecotheatre. For instance, animal studies, which continues to gain interdisciplinary popularity,3 is particularly useful in imagining plant and people relations because it considers the challenges and dangers of anthropomorphism.4 As Una Chaudhuri notes, since animals “will not speak, they are ceaselessly spoken, cast into a variety of discursive registers, endlessly troped . . . forced to perform us.”5 While Chaudhuri combats animal ventriloquism, Theresa May cautions theatre studies against becoming so preoccupied with the “snarl of anthropomorphism” that it ignores animal representation altogether.6 Both perspectives are necessary and applicable to plant and people interactions: on the one hand, plant assimilation is all too likely, given that loras’ means of expression are even more unfamiliar to humans than animals’ means; and on the other, theatre cannot continue to ignore plants for fear of misrepresenting them. One way to approach this dilemma, according to Donna Haraway, is to reject new representations for “new practices, other forms of life rejoining humans and not-humans,”7 which, for Haraway, includes plants, minerals, and cyborgs—“hybrid[s] of machine and organism.”8 Chaudhuri, May, and Haraway are all useful here in that they caution against Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar, “Interspecies,” Social Text 106 29, no. 1 (2011): 5. See James Gorman, “Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall,” New York Times, 2 January 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/animal-studies-move-from-the-lab-to-the-lecture-hall. html?pagewanted=all (accessed 7 October 2012). Gorman notes that animal studies is no longer limited to the sciences, but has been embraced by the humanities, with many departments offering entire courses on animals. 4 See, for instance, Una Chaudhuri, “(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (2007): 8–20; Shelly R. Scott, “Conserving, Consuming, and Improving on Nature at Disney’s Animal Kingdom,” Theatre Topics 17, no. 2 (2007): 111–27; and Donna J. Haraway, “Otherwordly Conversations; Terran Topics; Local Terms,” in Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological Reader on Biotechnology, ed. Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moster (London: Zed Books, 1992), 62–92. 5 Una Chaudhuri, “Animal Rites: Performing beyond the Human,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach, 506–20 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), quote on 511 (emphasis in original). 6 Theresa J. May, “Menageries of Blood: Animal Relations and Retaliations,” presentation at Earth Matters on Stage, Pittsburgh, 31 May–2 June 2012. 7 Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations,” 85 (emphasis in original). 8 Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century,” in The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, ed. Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Peter Trifonas, 117–58 (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2006), quote on 117. 2 3 PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 337 anthropomorphism, but do not let it obstruct interspecies engagement, and they emphasize the need for new practices to create interspecies dependency. While animal studies continues to consider what these new practices might be, theatre scholarship on human engagement with lora remains underexplored. Plants, in particular, have received far less attention from the humanities, even though humans are arguably more dependent on plants than they are on animals.9 Perhaps, though, this is because interaction between the two presents even more challenges than it does between humans and animals. While many animals communicate to humans, albeit limitedly, through sound and nonverbal expressions—a wagging tail, a peck, a purr—most plants rely only upon appearance, demonstrating their unmet needs through withering petals and stunted growth. Despite these fundamental differences, animals, humans, and plants are ecologically joined through the most basic of biological needs. They all require one another for life; plants depend on people and animals for carbon dioxide while the latter depend on the former for oxygen. Furthermore, people and animals depend on edible plants for sustenance, while some plants depend on humans for water and care. And yet, the very ubiquity and necessity of plants has caused them to be ignored and devalued. As Michael Marder observes: “The absolute familiarity of plants coincides with their sheer strangeness, the incapacity of humans to recognize elements of ourselves in the form of vegetal being.”10 Ironically, considering that human life would not be possible without vegetal life, plants largely ill background roles to human action. Thus the question remains: How might plants, which have “populated the margin of the margin,”11 be brought to the fore without being completely anthropomorphized? More to the point, how might performance facilitate interaction between plants and people without a shared language? In theorizing “plant-thinking,” Marder argues that even though plants are voiceless, they, just like humans, express themselves spatially.12 To the extent that they physically take up space, they are “spatialized materiality.”13 However, modern Western thought has abstracted plants, reducing them to resources and colorful backdrops. Since lora’s spatialized materiality largely goes unacknowledged, what is needed is a spatial reorientation, and this is where transplantment, the movement of plants across space and “out of place,” becomes crucial. Plant mobility has the potential to undermine spatial norms and to highlight the spatial materiality of plants, thus emphasizing plants’ and humans’ shared materiality. Bill Brown argues that objects become things when they either stop working or get in the way of humans; such occurrences alter the relationship between object and subject.14 While plants are living beings, they have been taxonomically reduced to objects, but, through spatial reorientation, their materiality can be reasserted. Encountering Bell’s mobile plants on city streets, people are not only made aware of the normative marginalization of plants, but are also confronted with their materiality. Hence a spatial reorientation can shift the theoretical relationship between plants and people. 9 As philosopher Michael Marder points out, Western philosophy has almost entirely left plants to scientists since the latter’s breakaway from theology and philosophy beginning in the sixteenth century. See Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 2. 10 Ibid., 4. 11 Ibid., 2. 12 Ibid., 75. 13 Ibid. 14 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. 338 / Courtney Ryan Considering that spatialized materiality is shared by all bio-organisms, it is unsurprising that, in its short existence, ecotheatre has almost always recognized a need for material, as well as metaphoric, interactions with the environment.15 Indeed, theatre studies as a whole has long attended to spatialized materiality,16 and Elinor Fuchs and Chaudhuri’s edited collection Land/Scape/Theater creates an essential intersection between ecotheatre and the broader ield of theatre studies.17 As always, however, the challenge is how to theorize materiality without abstracting it altogether.18 I suggest that a focus on new interspecies performance practices, like those of Bell, can shift the discursive practices, reorienting and, in some cases, reestablishing relationships between plants and people. Since animal studies has already suggested many ideas for human and animal engagement, I propose to develop and adapt these ideas, along with those from the broader ield of ecocriticism, to explore plant and people interdependency. My primary tool of analysis, however, is Bell’s performance itself, which both critiques plant marginalization and imagines new material practices for nonhuman agency and interspecies connectivity. Analyzing several of Bell’s pieces, I begin by interrogating the constructions of “nature”/culture and private/public before considering how the performance of an embodied transplantment can alter plant and people relations. After all, if anything will remind humans of their interdependency with other species, it is material engagement, and thus I turn to performance tactics that stage interactions between people and plants, hands and soil, carbon dioxide and oxygen. Urban Transplantment Despite the biological interdependency between plants and people, the latter have not always recognized the symbiotic relationship. Indeed, the domination of “nature” has a long and sordid history; according to Horkheimer and Adorno, Greco-Roman individualism depended on human dominion, a principle fully embraced by the Enlightenment.19 In the United States, industrialization, and now postindustrialization, have further alienated animals and especially plants from humans. This hierarchical divide is materially manifested in cityscapes where plants are largely treated as backdrops to human action. Take, for instance, the uniform saplings that dot many a US city sidewalk. Often evenly spaced and identical in species and size, these trees have a tendency to fade into the background as pedestrians or drivers hurry past. Despite 15 See, for instance, Una Chaudhuri, “‘There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake’: Toward an Ecological Theater,” Theater 25, no. 1 (1994): 23–31; and Theresa J. May, “Greening the Theater: Taking Ecocriticism from Page to Stage,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 7, no. 1 (2005): 84–103. 16 This material focus was most recently demonstrated in Theatre Journal’s October 2012 special issue, “Theatre and Material Culture.” 17 Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 18 As Karen Barad observes: “It seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.” See Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801. With regard to ecotheater speciically, Baz Kershaw suggests that “writing about ‘performance and nature’” is paradoxical, since both are so enmeshed in daily life; it is “like trying to trace the outline of the writing hand with the pen used in the writing” (Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 300). 19 Carolyn Merchant, ed., Ecology, 2nd ed. (New York: Humanity Books, 2008), 16–17. PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 339 the fact that trees and other lora make up an integral part of a city’s ecology, they are nonetheless sidelined, cast on the periphery of human activity. Thus by exposing this marginalization and domination Bell makes a timely and necessary intervention in human and plant relations. Bell is certainly not the irst artist to stage encounters between plants and people. Agrarian societies had a long history of performing vegetal rituals, which, as Victor Turner argues, included rites that altered the “quality of time,” taking participants outside of secular, normative time.20 Industrialization brought an end to such agrarian rites, and, in the United States today, Big Agriculture dominates farming policy. However, since performance itself has the potential to alter the quality of time, it is essential to (re)establishing a relationship between plants and people, both of whom move at different paces and occupy different places. For example, land art attempts to change spatial and temporal norms by making ephemeral art in and out of land. In particular, the land art of the 1960s and ’70s created prodigious works in remote Southwestern deserts; by temporarily fusing land and art, these works challenged the perceptions and norms surrounding both. However, whereas land art generally emphasizes the purity, breadth, and ephemerality of nature and art, Bell’s work critiques urbanites’ marginalization of lora and suggests new spatial relationships for lora and fauna engagement. Although Bell is not the only one of her contemporaries to perform with plants in urban ecologies,21 her focus on plant mobility and her use of absurdity and irony distinguish her from other vegetal artists.22 Formerly based in Boston and now in Seattle, Bell, raised in a family of landscapers, grows her own work. This means that she not only performs her pieces, but also their care; as she puts it, “The maintenance of the artwork is a performance in itself.”23 Some of the pieces analyzed here, like Portable Lawn and Personal Biosphere, are site-speciic performances where artist and plant navigate both busy city streets and quiet neighborhoods, directly undermining the binary between private and public, “plant” space and “people” space. Others, like Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests, are installations, yet their performance is implied through their spatial arrangement. However, the most important performance in both the site-speciic pieces and the installations is the performance of care. Before Bell’s work is shown in a venue, the artist asks staff members to sign adoption papers, formally committing themselves to the care of the plant-art. This performance of care builds interdependence between plant and person, even as the performance of ironic and absurd transplantments exposes humans’ marginalization of plants. Thus Bell simultaneously undermines hierarchical taxonomies and builds lora and fauna relationships, making a crucial, twofold intervention into species separatism. However, since change often begins with rethinking old practices before creating new ones, I irst consider the deconstruction of private and public space and lora marginalization before turning to embodied interspecies performance practices. 20 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Books, 1982), 24 (emphasis in original). 21 For a fairly comprehensive list of contemporary environmental artists, visit the online museum of environmental art, available at http://www.greenmuseum.org/ (accessed 10 January 2013). 22 An exception to this statement is Meghan Moe Beitiks, who, inluenced by Vaughn Bell, also deploys humor and irony in her performances with plants. For more on Beitiks, see http://www.meghanmoebeitiks. com/performance/ (accessed 14 January 2013). 23 Vaughn Bell, personal communication with author, 26 April 2013. 340 / Courtney Ryan Shopping-Cart Performances In order to expose the binary between private and public lora, I begin with Bell’s 2002–03 series Portable Environments, which includes several pieces, all of them featuring plants grown in shopping carts. While most of the pieces were eventually shown in a gallery,24 they began as ilmed performances in which the artist wheeled the shopping-cart plants throughout the city of Boston. In each piece, lora, in several feet of dirt, ills the cart entirely, straining against the metal, thus demonstrating that it was grown in the shopping cart rather than placed inside of it fully grown. The fusion of the stereotypically “natural” lora and the cultural, urbanized shopping cart blurs boundaries between “nature” and culture, even as the transplantment of Portable Environments contests the strict separation between public and private space. By planting lawns and trees, representative of an urban longing for suburbia, in shopping carts, which are more likely to be seen abandoned on city streets than at stores, Bell pairs a symbol of rootedness with one of transience. Transversing spatial demarcations of public and private streets with her Portable Environments, she speaks to a common problem in American cities: that of limited and unequal access to lora. As she pushes her shopping-cart plants down both relatively green and entirely barren streets, Bell and her portable environments call attention to the larger environment and its management. For instance, the strict organization of public greenery—be it around a park, street, public university, school, or courthouse—and its maintenance may only be conducted by oficial, approved gardeners.25 Furthermore, while some city dwellers are fortunate enough to have their own private gardens, many others are not. Thus their engagement with plants is limited to observation and aesthetic appreciation, assuming that they have ready access to public parks. Socioenvironmental injustices tend to be compounded, however, whereby people with the least amount of personal land often also have the least amount of public land in their neighborhoods, further decreasing the odds of interspecies engagement between people and plants. As urban geographer Edward Soja insists, “[j]ustice and injustice are infused into the multiscalar geographies in which we live,” and they create “lasting structures of unevenly distributed advantage and disadvantage.”26 Although there has been a recent surge in innovative gardening practices,27 spatialized and multilayered environmental injustices mean that working-class neighborhoods, often highly deindustrialized, are cut off from lora and, with it, clean air.28 One of the Portable Environments that particularly highlights this spatialized injustice is Portable Lawn (ig. 1). In the documented performance, Bell vigorously pushes Many of the pieces were shown in a 2003 exhibit, Portable Garden, at the Green Street Gallery in Boston. Certainly, this is not to say that city plants should not be grown or maintained, but rather that they should be made more integral to city life and that their care should be shared. 26 Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 20. 27 For example, in the wake of the 2008 recession, community gardens have sprung up in abandoned lots vacated during the height of the recession. Detroit, one of the cities hardest hit by the economic crisis, has seen a huge growth in community gardens. For more on this, see Mark Bittman, “Imagining Detroit,” New York Times, 17 May 2011, available at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/ imagining-detroit/ (accessed 10 January 2013). 28 Environmental justice scholarship has worked to expose the underlying connections between environmental degradation and race. For a fairly comprehensive overview of the movement, see Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, ed., Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). 24 25 PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 341 Figure 1. Portable Lawn (2003) by Vaughn Bell. (Photo: Vaughn Bell.) a metal shopping cart uphill; the cart is illed with dirt out of which sprouts unruly grass.29 Around half of the cart’s perimeter, Bell has placed a three-inch white picket fence, through which some of the grass grows. The conventional fence gestures to the privatization of land, but also undermines it by only marking off half of the lawn. Most signiicant of all, however, is where Bell travels with the Portable Lawn: through a Boston neighborhood with identical white houses, each with a uniform front yard featuring only trimmed grass and two shrubs. Each house’s patch of grass is guarded by a matching two-foot fence. The black, arched, iron-grate fencing appears to be more of an aesthetic choice than a protective one, yet it nonetheless serves to mark the yards as private property. The houses’ front lawns, like so many throughout the country, are nondescript and unremarkable; they are ubiquitous sights that have become part of a pernicious urban monoculture. Bell’s mobile lawn, with its tall, uneven blades of grass and visible roots, stands in stark contrast to the stationary lawns, with their stubby, 29 See http://www.vaughnbell.net/public/portable%20lawns.html (accessed 28 December 2012). 342 / Courtney Ryan homogenized grass and buried roots. With ironic absurdity, Bell juxtaposes her Portable Lawn with the houses unportable lawns in order to question the seeming normalcy of the latter and raise public awareness about an otherwise invisible monoculture. This monoculture has been tracked by Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp, who note that grass coverage of lawns is still increasing in the United States and with it so also is the use of pesticides and fertilizers.30 The pervasiveness of lawns, as well as the massive amounts of chemicals and water needed to keep them in a monocultural condition, goes unquestioned, causing the lawn to be largely “viewed as a cultural artifact, rather than a political or economic one.”31 Lawns are commonplace, so much so that they only attract attention when they are not well-maintained—when they are overgrown, sparse, or yellowing—or, in the case of Portable Lawn, when they are taken out of their usual context and location. Because lawns only receive attention when they are out of order, they are often viewed aesthetically rather than politically. Robbins and Sharp argue, however, that urban monoculture is part of a political economy through which homeowners become “turfgrass subjects,” not only subject to the inluence of global chemical companies and to the judgment of their neighbors, but also subject to the lawn itself, “whose essential ecology is high maintenance, fussy, and energy demanding.”32 Thus while cities’ lands may technically be getting greener, they are actually becoming more normative and more harmful to the environment. Perhaps most problematic to interspecies performance is the fact that the chemicals used to maintain the monochromatic purity of lawns also keep people from interacting with them in any meaningful way. Chemical lags and “Keep off the grass” signage discourage people from approaching lawns, let alone touching or smelling them. University and courthouse lawns are often delicately roped off like museum pieces, while most private lawns are more often than not fenced off, reinforcing the fact that they are on private property and that any public engagement with them will be deemed trespassing. If, however, the size and maintenance of one’s lawn is meant to represent one’s inancial and geographical security, then Bell’s work threatens such middle-class measurements of stability, supplanting them with roaming plants; transplanting that which is most meant to represent an established place, Portable Lawn exposes lawn monoculture and, with its half-fence, mocks the strict privatization of lawns. Other pieces from Portable Environments also emphasize the urban transplantment of lora, but, in addition, they highlight the seasonality of various plant species. For example, in Portable Tree, Bell, lushed and tired by the summer heat, slumps on the base of a streetlight. Next to her, a healthy sapling extends nearly ive feet above its shopping cart, its leaves shadowing a nearby parking meter. Portable Forest, meanwhile, 30 Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp, “Turfgrass Subjects: The Political Economy of Urban Monoculture,” in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw, 110–28 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), quote on 111. More recently, Michael T. Hernke and Rian J. Podein argue that although the majority of Americans have expressed interest in environmentally friendly lawn care, “aesthetic norms and the lobbying power of the lawn care industry” combine to maintain high pesticide usage in the United States. See Hernke and Podein, “Sustainability, Health and Precautionary Perspectives on Lawn Pesticides, and Alternatives,” Ecohealth 8, no. 2 (2011): 223–32, quote on 228. 31 Robbins and Sharp, “Turfgrass Subjects,” 112. 32 Ibid., 122. Robbins and Sharp are careful to note that the lawn does not operate outside of its own construction, but rather plays a powerful role in producing the monocultural economy. PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 343 takes place during winter in Boston; Bell, bundled in a puffy coat and a hat, strenuously pushes a shopping-cart ir tree through slush and puddles, forcefully turning the cart to cross the pedestrian lane. The ir, sparse but green, unevenly extends outward, its branches on one side nearly twice as long as those on the other side. The ir’s verdancy and unique dimensions, highlighted against the snow-splattered tarred streets and concrete sidewalks, suggest an alternate ecology, one in which uniform winter trees are not chopped down for short-lived Christmas celebrations, but are maintained as long-term urban companions. Performed in all locales and weather, Portable Environments deies spatial and temporal norms that dictate where plants should grow and when people should engage with them. Performing both care and artistry, Bell grows seasonal plants that will thrive in particular conditions; thus the deciduous Portable Tree appears in the summer months, and the coniferous Portable Forest in the winter. However, although Bell does not alter the seasonality of plants, she nonetheless stages an alternate ecology by engaging with plants in extreme temperatures. As countless songs and poems attest, spring is typically the season for planting and, by extension, interacting with lora. By playing with plants in harsh weather, Bell contests humans’ limited seasonal engagement with them. Despite perspiring in the summer and shivering in the winter, she takes the portable environments with her on city jaunts, thus performing a year-round interaction with them; not only does Bell bring seasonally marginalized plants to the fore, she also makes the most rooted lora—trees—mobile. If lawns are symbolic of middle-class stability, trees are symbolic of longevity. Often pressed against buildings and surrounded by concrete, city trees tend to go unobserved, at least until one of their branches falls or one of their roots cracks the concrete. In Portable Tree and Portable Forest, however, the trees loom over their shopping carts; comically large in contrast to their containers, the trees take center stage in the cityscape. With her portable environments, which appear where least expected, Bell exposes naturalized representations of lora that cast plants in background roles. According to Chaudhuri, theatre’s marginalization of “nature” can be traced back to nineteenthcentury naturalism, which instilled anti-ecological practices still prevalent today. However, she argues that “by making space on its stage for ongoing acknowledgments of the rupture it participates in—the rupture between nature and culture . . .—the theater can become the site of a much-needed ecological consciousness.”33 Not only does Bell highlight the constructed ruptures between “nature” and culture and public and private spaces, but she also creates a rupture of her own: the sight of her and Portable Environments traversing the city in all weather directly upsets normative representations of gardens as ixed, stationary, and rooted. Presenting lora in unusual circumstances, the artist ruptures rather than restores binaries of “nature”/culture and public/private and, in that sense, her work may be relective of what geographer Maria Kaika calls the “urban uncanny”—moments when the supposedly “natural” makes an unexpected appearance in domesticated spaces.34 The urban uncanny in Bell’s work pops up, for instance, when Portable Tree brushes a parking meter or when the artist waits to cross Chaudhuri, “There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake,” 28. Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (New York: Routledge, 2005), 51. Although Kaika is particularly concerned with water and the “urban uncanny”—for instance, the way in which a leaky toilet can bring the “outside” “inside”—the term might also apply to other material ruptures that expose the dichotomy between nature and culture. 33 34 344 / Courtney Ryan a busy intersection with Portable Forest. Portable Environments is just that—its pieces travel across demarcated spaces of public and private, “natural” and cultural. Whereas humans imagine themselves moving from one environment to another, Bell’s shoppingcart plants transplant urban environments, and are themselves environments. Even though grass covers more urban surfaces each year, spaces for material interaction between plants and people continue to vanish. As ecocritic Catriona Sandilands observes: “The loss of a public realm for ecological discussion signals the loss of the place where we might come to understand ourselves as ecological citizens rather than as managerial subjects or disciplined objects.”35 The sight of Bell and Portable Environments traveling along Boston streets may initially seem absurd, but it also may lead one to consider why such a sight seems bizarre. The shopping-cart pieces not only signal a loss of an ecological commons—a space in which lora and fauna can interact—but they also create transitory environments for ecological exchange between diverse bio-organisms. On the most practical level, Bell’s performance recycles abandoned shopping carts, turning discarded signs of neglect into mobile homes for plants. Insomuch as plants are typically deined by their lack of locomotion—their inability to move from one place to another—Bell grants her portable pieces a greater degree of physical agency.36 While the plants still depend on the artist to move them, just as they depend on her for daily care, their mobility destabilizes accepted deinitions of plants as ixed, rooted, and instituted. Biologically, plants have always been a crucial part of their ecologies, but, as the portable shopping carts travel through multifarious environments, they perform and signify new practices of interspecies interdependency. Thus even as Portable Environments critiques urban monoculture and plant marginalization, it also gestures toward a new interspecies performance practice. Transplanting Taxonomies Bell’s Portable Environments is not the artist’s only series to both deconstruct and reimagine human and plant relations. However, whereas Portable Environments transplants lora across public and private space, the gallery installations Personal Landscapes: Desert, Crag, Lawn (2005–06) and A Pack of Forests (2008) transplant lora from the vegetal plane to the animal plane. The two related pieces feature leashed plants, ranging in size from miniature to small, attached to dolly wheels. The leashed plants look as though they are awaiting walks, thereby linking their domestication to that of pet animals, species traditionally walked by humans. Like Portable Environments, Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests parody the ways in which culture and “nature” have been historically represented as separate, oppositional entities. However, the pieces also destabilize the human/animal/plant triad and its ranked taxonomy; thus they build on Portable Environments, suggesting not only that plants can transplant ixed spatial boundaries, but that they can also transplant nominalistic boundaries. Even as they undermine the commodiication of plants (and, subsequently, animals), Bell’s leashed pieces also igure as what Haraway calls “companion species,”37 gesturing toward a performative exchange between people and plants. 35 Catriona Sandilands, “Raising Your Hand in the Council of All Beings: Ecofeminism and Citizenship,” Ethics and the Environment 4, no. 2 (1999): 222. 36 The online versions of both The Free Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster dictionary describe plants as lacking locomotive movement. Although “locomotion” is often deined as the ability to move from place to place, it can also be deined as the “act” of moving. See http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ locomotion (accessed 10 January 2013). 37 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 7. PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 345 Both Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests consist of plants in wheeled trays made of wood or porcelain. Although Bell has, at times, taken the pieces for city walks and invited gallery visitors to do likewise, this particular artistic iteration only implies mobility, capturing the plants in a pre-movement moment. Nonetheless, the performance of caring for the plants and the careful framing of the plant art are performances all their own, evidenced by the precise staging of both pieces. For instance, Personal Landscapes features ive transportable plants: the three largest are leashed closest to the gallery wall while the two smaller plants, which are no more than four inches by two inches, trail behind (ig. 2).38 The largest tray contains diverse cacti surrounded by desert stones, and, unlike the smaller pieces, it has large wheels that extend beyond the plant’s base, not unlike monster wheels. The deep tire tread, combined with the metal frame and chain-link leash, suggests a sturdy, mobile plant that is prepared for all kinds of terrain. In contrast, the four other plants’ wheels are neatly tucked underneath their trays and their leashes are made of colorful cloth. For instance, the middle box contains tall, “wild”39 grass and has a vibrant purple leash; attached to the grass are hot pink leashes hitched to the two miniature boxes, which also contain grass. The three matching mobile plants—the larger one ahead of the other two, the two smaller ones following directly behind—evoke any animal or human leading its young. The inal plant, a mixture of crag and moss, is shaped like a shaggy Yorkshire terrier alertly awaiting its walk. On the one hand, the title of the piece, Personal Landscapes, suggests a parody of humanist attempts to classify and dominate “nature.” Although the term “landscape” has been helpful in acknowledging human construction of the land, it has contrarily strengthened the divide between humans and the land, prioritizing intellectual conceptualization over material engagement. As ecofeminist Val Plumwood argues, “[t]o describe the land as a ‘landscape’ is to privilege the visual over other, more rounded and embodied ways of knowing the land.”40 It is to suggest that the land can be surveyed and encompassed, and adding the word “personal” to the term “landscape” goes even further, insinuating that land can be owned, appropriated, privatized. Inviting “virtual and idealist approaches to the land,”41 landscape terminology42 often abstracts the very materiality it seeks to contextualize.43 Thus combined with the leashes, Bell’s title gently mocks human ownership and dominion of the land. On the other hand, the phrase “personal landscapes” can refer not only to private ownership of the land, but also to private, or intimate, experiences of it. As Bell herself says: “I guess what I’m really interested in is landscape but not just landscape as a concept, that’s something in the distance, but as a physical reality that humans are The piece was part of a January 2006 Seattle exhibit at SOIL gallery. In the last decade, “wild lawns” have been suggested as a greener alternative to turf grass because they consist of native grasses and wildlowers. They have better iltration than turf grass and thus require less water and maintenance. However, I have placed scare quotes around the word “wild” to call the implied acultural purity of the term into question. 40 Val Plumwood, “The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture, and Agency in the Land,” Ethics & the Environment 11, no. 2 (2006): 123. 41 Ibid. 42 It is important to note that Plumwood is most critical of cultural landscape studies, although she also inds the solitary term “landscape” problematic. 43 For instance, although Fuchs and Chaudhuri regard “landscape” as a useful mediation between theatre and the world and between space and place, they also “acknowledge certain signiicant discontinuities and occlusions within the assumptions attached to the idea of landscape,” and thus break up the term in their book’s title, Land/Scape/Theater, 2–3. 38 39 346 / Courtney Ryan Figure 2. Personal Landscapes: Desert, Crag, Lawn (2006) by Vaughn Bell. (Photo: Richard Nicol.) intimately connected to. I’m interested in the way the work can sort of reinforce that connection or make us aware of that connection in a different way.”44 Both Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests stage an alternate connection between people and plants, one in which the latter, for better or for worse, are compared to animals. If the leashes alone do not make this analogy evident, the crag and moss plant in the shape of a terrier certainly does. By directly placing plants in the role of companion animals, Bell not only stages an interspecies landscape, but also subverts the hierarchical landscape of human/animal/plant. However, just as the term “landscape” is both problematic and productive, so also is the comparison of plants to animals. Because plants have been so marginalized, their comparison to animals is, in one sense, a promotion. Of course, this is not to say that plants are in any way inferior to animals, or humans for that matter, but rather that they have been taxonomically and practically treated as such. Meanwhile, human regard for companion animals has only intensiied in the last century, to the point that pets are integral members of families, sometimes even replacements for spouses and children. Indeed, the immense popularity of companion animals in urban New York has led Roberta Olson and Kathleen Hulser to call the city a “petropolis.”45 Urban canine and feline companions, in particular, have increasingly been treated like humans—given organic food, traditionally human names like Paul and Molly, and luxurious stays at pet hotels.46 Bell’s 44 See http://kqed02.streamguys.us/anon.kqed/topics/arts/gallery-crawl/0908-gallerycrawl.m4v (accessed 28 December 2012). 45 Roberta J. M. Olson and Kathleen Hulser, “Petropolis: A Social History of Urban Animal Companions,” Visual Studies 18, no. 2 (2003): 133–43. 46 Heidi J. Nast, “Critical Pet Studies?” Antipode 38, no. 5 (2006): 894. In light of the growing pet industry, Nast suggests that a new geographical discipline, “critical pet studies,” is needed. PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 347 evocative Personal Landscapes considers what it might be like if plants were treated as lovingly as companion animals. What if humans rushed home from work to play with their plants, to take them for neighborhood walks, to feed them only organic food? How might this performance of care bring plants from the periphery of human thought to the center? For instance, the three grass plants in Personal Landscapes may be interpreted as a broad sketch of family, a grouping of the same lora in varying sizes. The miniature trays of “wild” lawn, in contrast to the larger tray, imply an ecological vulnerability and a greater need for personal attention and care. Likewise, beyond linking the domestication of plants to that of animals, the dog-shaped crag and moss can foster the same awareness and concern for minerals and lora that are typically only bestowed on household animals. And yet, by linking plant and animal care, Bell also highlights the species’ mutual subjugation. Animal studies has considered the anthropomorphism and commodiication of animals for quite some time, and much of its indings apply to the “pet” plants in Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests. For example, of all the animals that humans encounter, a staggering 98 percent are not companion animals, but farmed animals intended for human consumption.47 Thus even as canines and felines receive increasingly more protective rights, most animals continue to go entirely unprotected. Linking plants to animals, then, does not necessarily afford them more ethical consideration. Similarly, just because companion animals are pampered does not automatically mean that they have more agency than marginalized plants; in fact, it may mean quite the opposite. As much as the term “companion animal” suggests an egalitarian relationship between humans and animals, the leashes in Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests expose the underbelly of pet domestication. This is colorfully highlighted in Personal Landscapes with hot pink, purple, black, and silver leashes, each of which seems to match its plant: the delicately thin pink leashes are attached to the miniature boxes of grass; the thicker purple leash is attached to the larger box of grass; the heavy, chain-link leash is attached to the tray of rugged cacti; and the black leash is attached to the black-and-brown moss-terrier. By complementing the plants with coordinating leashes, which are symbolic of the loras’ domestication, Bell comically undermines the infantilization of both companion plants and animals. As Chaudhuri cautions, “the anthropomorphic and infantilizing mass-cultural discourse on animals” casts animals as “just like us, only cuter.”48 Thus while treating animals and, in Bell’s pieces, plants like miniature humans may result in better care for both, it also refuses to acknowledge nonhumans on their own terms as simultaneously connected to and distinct from humans. At the same time, A Pack of Forests warns that, unless lora gains the protection and care that has been afforded to companion animals, there will soon be no more forests left at all. As in Personal Landscapes, the 2008 piece features several mobile plants, all of them leashed to a gallery wall. Unlike the earlier piece, however, A Pack of Forests consists of eight plants, all of them the same variety and all of them in identical ifty by thirty by forty-four inch trays. Six of the plants are in a horizontal line, with two trailing behind them, and, as in Personal Landscapes, the plants all seem to alertly and 47 Donald Wolfson and Marianne Sullivan, “Foxes in the Hen House: Animals, Agribusiness, and the Law: A Modern American Fable,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. Cass R. Sustein and Martha C. Nussbaum, 205–33 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), on 206. 48 Chaudhuri, “Animal Rites,” 512. 348 / Courtney Ryan eagerly await something. However, whereas in the irst piece Bell’s animalization playfully mocks the commodiication of plants awaiting their walk, her animalization in the second suggests that the “forests” are awaiting a much more ominous event—extinction. Ironically, A Pack of Forests features no trees and no raised plants that might be mistaken for trees; instead, lat, unvaried moss ills each container. The piece thus speaks to an ongoing deforestation that, if left unchecked, will leave places like the Amazon rainforest as stripped as Bell’s forests.49 Even as A Pack of Forests parodies human attempts to miniaturize and appropriate vast forests, it warns that, if lora continues to be treated solely as a resource for humans, we may just succeed in consuming it altogether. However, while Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests critique plant exploitation and domestication, they also transplant stereotypical human/animal/plant taxonomies. Each of the pieces is on a leash and attached to a wheeled mechanism and is thus not only reminiscent of an animal, but also a cyborg. Exceeding taxonomical boundaries, Bell’s plant art is made up of multiple organic and inorganic substances that cannot be limited to one ixed category. More recently, Haraway has turned to “companion species,” of which cyborgs are “junior siblings.”50 Unlike the term “companion animal,” the term “companion species” is heterogeneous enough to include lora, fauna, and minerals, and, like the cyborg, it offers the potential for ongoing interspecies hybridity. By combining plant, animal, machine, and mineral (the stones around the desert cacti), Bell subverts singular, hermetic categorizations, insisting instead on multiple, ongoing interspecies connections. Transplanting normative species’ divisions, Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests blur the lines between where one species ends and another begins. Thus the two pieces not only parody human appropriation and domestication of plants, but they also stage a new interspecies hybridity that undermines the ixity of the human/animal/plant triad. From Deconstructive Transplantment to Embodied Transplantment The analysis of Bell’s work up to this point has focused on the satirical deconstruction of “nature”/culture, public/private, and human/animal/plant; it has highlighted the mobile transplantment in Portable Environments and the taxonomical transplantment in Personal Landscapes and A Pack of Forests. While all of Bell’s work simultaneously subverts plant norms and performs new interspecies interactions, I have thus far largely focused on the former in order to irst undermine existing practices before imagining new ones. Now, however, I turn to embodied interspecies practices, for, as Wendy Arons points out, “[w]hat ‘nature’ is, and how we relate to it, may be discursively constructed, but no matter how we apprehend that nature, there are in fact real ecological systems that are affected by material action (or non-action)” by humans.51 In the performances 49 For example, even though Brazil has inally begun protecting the rainforest, with the rate of deforestation dropping by 80 percent during the last six years, there are fears that political regulations will once again become lax. See Alexei Barrionuevo, “In Brazil, Fears of a Slide Back for Amazon Protection,” New York Times, 24 January 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/world/americas/in-brazilprotection-of-amazon-rainforest-takes-a-step-back.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed 10 January 2013). 50 Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signiicant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 11. 51 Wendy Arons, “Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide: Challenges from Ecocriticism and Evolutionary Biology for Theater Historiography,” in Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions, ed. Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen, 148–61 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), quote on 150. PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 349 previously analyzed, all of the plants have apparatuses that assist their mobility, but also physically separate them from people; the shopping-cart handles and the leashes allow humans to push and pull wheeled plants, but they create distance between the two as well. In the following performances, however, human and plant are materially merged. In the irst, which is a series of plant biospheres, people are transplanted instead of plants; human heads are surrounded by glass domes illed with various lora. This inverted transplantment places lora at center stage, quite literally encompassing humans and facilitating an up-close and personal interspecies sensorial exchange. In the next and last piece, Garment for Flora–Fauna Relationship, lora is transplanted to the human body, suggesting a strategy for extended material exchange between plants and people. Together, these pieces stage innovative alternate ecologies and embodied practices for interspecies interaction. Biospheres for Plant and People Permeability If Bell’s mobile plants act as portable companions, her biospheres create alternate ecologies in which plants and humans are on the same material plane. Such ecologies are crucial, given that cultural studies’ spatial shift in the last few decades has tended to focus on the comings and goings of humans in space, rather than the environmental changes within space. In terms of theatre studies in particular, Chaudhuri notes an overemphasis on humans’ “ecological transit,” their moves to and from environments with which they are “utterly and irremediably at odds.”52 In other words, although space can speak,53 it is unclear whether humans can stand still long enough to listen. In response to such postmodern haste, Bell has designed several biospheres over the last decade, some of which include Portable Personal Biosphere (2003–04), Biosphere Built for Two (2006), Village Green (2008), and Metropolis (2012). Each biosphere houses a variety of moss and, in the larger pieces, ferns. All of the pieces are made of clear glass, but Portable Personal Biosphere is spherically shaped and has one hole in its base for a human head, while the others are rectangularly shaped and have between two and four holes for heads (igs. 3–4). The larger pieces, which are too cumbersome for mobility, have been hung from gallery ceilings so that visitors can stand with their heads inside a piece and their bodies outside.54 Bell’s biospheres allow just enough space for people to peek their heads in—there is no room for head-turning, let alone for arms. Made stationary by all of the pieces (with the exception of the Portable Personal Biosphere), human visitors to the biospheres have nowhere to go; surrounded by lora that they might otherwise never notice, they have little choice but to fully acknowledge the plants that now loom large at their eye level. In the biospheres, the encompassing moss is magniied as the human body is transplanted, stilled, and minimized. Unlike Biosphere 2, the prodigious glass ark completed in 1991, Bell’s biospheres are not made to human scale, but to moss scale. The Biosphere 2 project began because of an interest in human preservation and, as Baz Kershaw points out, it “has been seen as a metaphor for human survival against all the odds produced by the human 52 Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 82. 53 As May argues in “Greening the Theater,” 96. 54 Most recently, Village Green was exhibited at Lycoming College Gallery in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 2009. 350 / Courtney Ryan Figure 3. Personal Biosphere (2004) by Vaughn Bell. (Photo: Vaughn Bell.) Figure 4. Biosphere Built for Two (2006) by Vaughn Bell. (Photo: Vaughn Bell.) PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 351 animal.”55 By shaping her biospheres for moss rather than people, Bell privileges the former over the latter. Whereas Biosphere 2 was created as a place for humans to study and classify diverse organisms and environments, Bell’s pieces are places for plants; humans are welcome to visit, but the biospheres are not able to wholly or permanently accommodate them. As Bell writes in her “real estate” description of Biosphere for Two: “Inhabitants: moss of various species, humans at times.”56 The human heads are temporarily transplanted to the realm of the plants, which physically and ideologically take center stage. Typical of Bell’s work, the biospheres convey a double meaning: on the one hand, they are facetiously commodiied, advertised as vacation getaways far “from the crowds and noise”;57 on the other, they are miniature worlds that imagine a greener and more intimate engagement with lora. For instance, with regard to Portable Personal Biosphere, Bell claims that “[a]s you walk, even down a busy sidewalk, you will have the sensation that you are looking out over a green horizon.”58 Even as she employs the playful tone of a saleswoman, mocking human desire to miniaturize and possess “nature,” Bell also envisions a more egalitarian relationship between plants and people. Spatially inverting loras’ position, she places them on humans’ visual level rather than at ground level. Enclosed in the biospheres, human visitors become more physically attuned to the varieties of moss and their speciic environment—the moss’s dips and swells and the beads of moisture that gradually form on the glass as plants and people exchange gases. These subtle environmental changes, detected by senses that are temporarily ixed in place rather than traveling to and fro, reveal the undeniable ways in which “place and person are permeable.”59 Their exposed oriices surrounded by plants, visitors to the biospheres are sensorially attuned and turned to the plants’ materiality. This igurative and literal turn to plants resonates with Haraway’s deinition of nature as both a topos—a “place,” or rather a “commonplace”—and a tropos—a “trope” or “turn.”60 It is a topos in that it is a discursive place where conversants may ind common ground with which “to rebuild public cultures,” but it is also a tropos, a “igure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement.”61 In that tropos means to “turn,” Haraway argues that humans and nonhumans alike must turn toward the earth to articulate new, expanded understandings of nature, creating commonplaces that can lead to Otherworlds.62 Bell’s biospheres are places unto themselves, tropes of larger ecologies; they create miniature environments in which plants are central and, in the case of Portable Personal Biosphere, also traverse other environments. It is in these biospheres where, ironically, humans cannot turn their heads away from plants and must instead turn toward new conceptions of them; in particular, the shared biospheres like Kershaw, Theatre Ecology, 318. Vaughn Bell, Biosphere for Two, available at http://www.vaughnbell.net/public/biospherefortwo/index. html (accessed 10 January 2013). 57 Ibid. 58 Vaughn Bell, Portable Personal Biosphere, available at http://www.vaughnbell.net/biosphere/index.html (accessed 11 January 2013). 59 May, “Greening the Theater,” 94. 60 Donna J. Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations: Terrain Topics, Local Terms,” Science as Culture 3, no. 1 (1992): 67. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 55 56 352 / Courtney Ryan Figure 5. Garment for Flora–Fauna Relationship (2006) by Vaughn Bell. (Photo: Vaughn Bell.) PLAYING WITH PLANTS / 353 Metropolis, which can accommodate four human heads at once, offer a commonplace for new performance practices between humans and lora. Physically forced to stop turning away from lora, humans are temporarily transplanted from human time and place to plant time and place; the human and plant hierarchy momentarily displaced, the biodiverse species can begin to physically sense a more egalitarian Otherworld. Toward an Interspecies Performance We have explored plants as mobile environments, companion species, and sensorial ecologies, and, in closing, I turn to one last performance by Bell: Garment for Flora–Fauna Relationship (2006). Unlike most of the artist’s work, which simultaneously parodies the human dominion of plants and suggests new modes of interaction, Garment is largely concerned with the latter. I turn to it last because, of all of Bell’s pieces, it offers the most hopeful and embodied interspecies performance practice. Like the artist’s biospheres, it stages an inter-embodied relationship whereby plant and person are physically joined; however, unlike the biospheres, which can only temporarily house human heads, Garment allows for an extended interspecies exchange. Wearing a dress with a pouch at the chest for a plant and a side pouch for a water spritzer, Bell inhales what she needs, the plant’s oxygen, and exhales what the plant needs, her carbon dioxide (ig. 5). While people and plants exchange gases every day, humans have often ignored and abused this relationship, but her Garment puts the two species in close enough proximity that they are quite literally exchanging gases. Necessitating a material engagement between lora and fauna, Garment not only upsets taxonomical hierarchies, but it also performs a relationship between humans and plants based on reciprocity rather than subjugation. Through such eco-performances, which create a space of exchange between biodiverse species, notions of human dominion are not only deconstructed, but also supplanted by mutual dependence. With her garment, Bell performs the ultimate transplantment, fusing plant and person. The plant is wrapped in the same cloth that she herself is in, and it rests close to her diaphragm, which expands and contracts with every inhale and exhale. Even if she wanted to, Bell cannot forget the plant and its needs, just as, with every breath, she cannot forget that the plant enables it. As Stacy Alaimo writes, science and environmental ethics are changed by the awareness that “‘the environment’ is not located somewhere out there, but is always the very substance of ourselves.”63 Garment creates such awareness, quite literally materializing plant and human interconnectivity. The transplantment of lora from the margins of the city to the center of the human body also transplants lora from the abstract plane of human thought to the material plane. Performing a material ethics, lora and fauna care for each other: breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. 63 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 4.