JUSTIN CLEMENS will read his work Rooted, and poems by others. DANNI ZUVELA will discuss listening to vegetal others. MAKIKO YAMAMOTO (AU/JP) will present her works Banana A-part; Coffee and Tobacco and Onion. NATHAN GRAY (AU/DE) will present The Station, a science-fictional lecture-performance featuring three narrators, one of whom is a tree; with reading and music from Zara Kimber.

If plants use sound (to detect and shape their environment), might it follow that they can also speak? The presumption that because we don’t hear them, they don’t have something to say – the trope of plant muteness – serves only to further other the vegetal world. This program counters plant silence through a series of engagements with plants as conversation partners, interlocutors, narrators and companions. In situating the speaking plant at ‘the fulcrum of its own world’ (Michael Marder), we encounter the problem of never knowing, or being able to know, fully, what it is to be a plant. What conditions might justify what would inevitably be a process of, if not appropriation, then at least compromise, to allow the projections of our speaking for plants? Is it possible to hold our not-knowing lightly enough to allow the vegetal subject and our listening to co-create each other?

Liquid Architecture acknowledge the support of Creative Victoria to commission Makiko Yamamoto and Nathan Gray's work, earlier versions of which were presented in Berlin and Lofoten.

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.