MICHAEL MARDER will give a keynote lecture on attuning to the self-refreshing systems of nature. MONICA GAGLIANO will translate the language of plants. MADELEINE MILLS will offer a poem on floral awareness. CHARLIE SOFO will note how well flowers are trending.

Superfluity to the bare needs of human existence means that flowers, in Western art and culture, are emblematic of that which is decorative, frivolous, and insubstantial. Yet to a systems understanding of ecology, flowers are the precise opposite. In the delicate symbiosis between bees and flowering plants, each enables the ongoing existence of the other. What allows us to continue to regard flowers as trivial - by ignoring the critical interdependence with bees - is, then, anthropocentrism; under-examined, but not undisturbable. Plants and bees message each other, and us, in a running three-way commentary on the local, the temporal and the floral. We tune our plant-listening to bees’ frequency, to hear the hum of self-renewal underscoring and connecting vegetable and human existence.

This event is one branch of the WHY LISTEN TO PLANTS? exhibition program at RMIT Design Hub. Plants know worlds, they contain worlds and they make worlds