Imagine that you can never leave where you are standing. Imagine that you can see without eyes, listen without ears, speak, and scream without a mouth. Imagine that your brain dwells underground. Imagine that your mind is not one but thousands.
Roots & Seeds' goal of developing and emotional connection for sustainable organizing and living comes to life in an interactive, transdisciplinary tool that reimagines our relationship with botany. Through a series of activities that take its audience on a journey through time and space, this collaborative tool is designed to show us what a posthuman, emotional connection to plants looks like.
Based on Guy Debord's dérive, this tool proposes two different activities. On the first one, groups are encouraged to begin an "instrospection discovery" and find one or two plants in the garden, park or forest and draw them. The plants need to be chosen based on the feeling, memory, or association they evoke, allowing the audience to go back in time and find plants that were once relevant in their lives.
The second activity takes the audience in a series of delirious points of view, that will either take them underground, allow them to become insects or discover the intricate way plants think.
GABINO CARBALLO is a landscape architect and project manager with extensive experience in the promotion of urban biodiversity, the application of nature-based solutions, and green space design and management. He has worked for over sixteen years as an internal consultant for Barcelona's Local Government, where he has led the implementation of naturalization policies and techniques in public spaces across the city. Prior to this he worked on public, corporate and private landscape and garden design, both in Spain and other countries.
He is a regular guest lecturer in various academic institutions and the author of several publications, articles and essays. He is also a board member of the Spanish association of public parks and gardens, and is responsible for its communication and international relations. He has a long-standing interest in art, design and their relationship with urban design and the environment. As an artist, he has worked in the creation and implementation of ephemeral gardens and horticultural installations, and he is now developing biodiversity-based artworks with the collective Epicuro Lab.
Image by Klemen Skočir