Introduction: Plant Performance

Plants perform their own interests and purposes. in ways that afford invite specific human experiences. also complex biopolitical roles. With these multivalent understandings of plant performance mind, this introduction to the “Plant Performance” issue Performance Philosophy outlines editors’ broadly feminist approach challenges facing scholars artists field Critical Plant Studies. We present challenges, including colonisation decolonisation, botanical aesthetics its vegetal limits, instrumentality respect, phytopolitics liveliness, as provocations for grappling with ecological, political creative relations world. The introduction, alongside eight essays included issue, considers how thinking might create conditions a more contextual, critical, reflexive, nuanced, and/or urgent understanding plant-human relationships, both historically current moment. In addition considering questions performative agency, foregrounds politico-aesthetic which performances cannot help but occur. It details works art intervene conditions, it contributes development global multiply-situated network performative, critical knowledges, relations, practices.