Follow the Plants expands from an experimental exchange initiated by Madeleine Collie and developed in dialogue with Yvonne Billimore that situates artists practices within and among the creative lives of plants.

The process invites eighteen artists across Americas, Australia, Asia, Europe and South Africa to share their research with another artist, to explore plants, as growing, decaying, metamorphosing beings that shape the places they inhabit. Through the project artists are invited to share long-term durational research practices with another artist. Each artist opens their approaches to thinking, making and learning about the movements of plants, people and practices of kinship across territories.

Follow the Plants is the result of a slow practice of curatorial and artistic research which began with the formation of the Food Art Research Network that has explored how our worlds share an interconnected metabolism. The projects exchanged rethink the environmental impact of settler societies, the forces of monopoly commerce, plantation logics and resource extraction on the lively socialites of plant-human communities. Follow the Plants is an exercise in carefully metabolising each other’s research, to learn how to think the world through another’s questions and to practise sharing custodianship of collective knowledge.

“Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)