“Their time is now and tomorrow”
An interview with Swiss art and media theorist Yvonne Volkart, co-curator of the exhibition “Plants Intelligence”, open until November 23 at the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre
This year, the Riga-based RIXC Center for New Media Culture celebrates its 25th anniversary. Since its founding, RIXC has placed partnership and cross-border networking at the heart of its development. In this spirit, the RIXC Art Science Festival 2025 has been organized in close cooperation with key partners from Europe and beyond.
Also this year’s leading theme, “Plants Intelligence,” emerged from a close collaboration with the Basel-based research team of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded project “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant”, developed by the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. Over the past four years, this research has explored how plant “thinking” and vegetal intelligence can inspire new methods, forms of knowledge, and aesthetic approaches, offering models for both artistic creation and ecological awareness.
The RIXC “Plants Intelligence” exhibition in the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre. Photo: Kristīne Madjare
A key figure in this collaboration is Yvonne Volkart (Switzerland) – art and media theorist, lecturer, and head of research at the Institute Art Gender Nature, as well as the principal investigator of “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant” (2022–2025). The RIXC “Plants Intelligence” exhibition, curated by Raitis Smits and Yvonne Volkart as part of the RIXC Art Science Festival 2025, runs in Riga until November 23 in the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre. The exhibition explores the idea of “plant intelligence” from scientific, artistic, and indigenous perspectives.
In her new book Technologies of Care (available for free download), Yvonne Volkart writes: "Caring is enacting practice, desiring sensing, and responding across species. This is why I prefer the verb form caring to the noun care. It has a transitive direction, going toward the other, perhaps toward the other of the self. The relational to care is open to alterity, to the strangeness of the world". I wanted to talk with Yvonne about how she perceives this strangeness of the world, about the different kind of time in which plants live and respond to environmental challenges, and about “transmaking” as a mode of artistic creation.
We met at the café of the National Art Museum and talked until the very moment when, in the now-empty café, it was time to close. Yvonne listened to me attentively, asked clarifying questions, and from time to time paused to reflect. Deliberateness in judgment is an extremely rare quality in our time – perhaps, in some way, it is also shaped by the influence of plants and the practice of engaging with them.
Yvonne Volkart
I’d like to start with your childhood, as I understand your father was a gardener and a botanist. So you were probably in contact with plants from a very early age?
That’s a nice question, because I’ve been thinking about plants professionally for quite some time, but only recently I realised how strong that impact was. At that time, my father was the gardener in the Tropical and Succulent houses of the Botanical Garden, taking care of orchids and succulents. And there wasn’t automatic technical shading. So, for example, if we went on a trip and the weather changed, we had to go home because he wanted to shade or not shade the plants. He wanted always the best for his plants. So, the weather has been always an important thing for me. It determined our lives, so to speak.
Because exactly the weather – that’s what enables the plants. And it showed me how strongly we depend on the weather. That’s one thing. And the other thing is that I was always surrounded by plants. I could visit my father, and sometimes the gardeners even gave me a little corner with soil and plants where I could stay and play a bit. There, we also had a huge garden with vegetables. It felt completely normal to have plants as our companions. Also, when we were walking, my father would say hello to some plants that you could hardly even see – they looked like nothing special, you know, just some grasses or something. But he could always tell big stories about everything. That was my childhood… But for my brother, for example, it wasn’t as important as it was for me.
Your brother – what does he do? Which profession is he in now?
He's a software engineer.
I see... Did you have any favorite plants in the Botanical garden where your father worked?
Yes. As a child, I really loved mimosa, because it has a timeline a bit similar to humans: you can touch it, and it closes its leaves immediately. Monica Gagliano, a very important scholar in the field of plant intelligence, made her first experiments with Mimosa pudica, showing that plants have a kind of memory – that they can “remember” that being touched isn’t dangerous in every case, so they don’t always close their leaves. Anyway, this plant shows immediate reactions. Usually, plants don’t do that. You can’t do experiments that are visible in real time, because plants need more time – often a month or so – to show how they react. But Mimosa pudica reacts immediately. That’s why people like to use it for experiments.
The RIXC “Plants Intelligence” exhibition in the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre. Photo: Kristīne Madjare
Did you notice this already in childhood, or did you understand later that plants have another timeline, another sense of time?
I think you notice it quite early, even though at first it seems like there’s no reaction. The plants are around you, and you might think, “Oh, they’re boring; they don’t do anything.” But if you live with them, you start to see that they change over time. One day you wake up and notice a leaf has turned yellow. Or if you move them from one place to another, you see that they somehow find a new way to grow. But they don’t do it immediately – they need some time to adjust to the new situation. When you live with them and occasionally observe them, you notice that they slowly, slowly adjust and change over time. That’s how you realise that they are living beings with their own sense of time, which is different from ours.
I’ve noticed, for example, that sometimes you expect plants to come up – you put their seeds in the soil, but nothing happens. Then, maybe two years later, they suddenly shoot up. For some reason, they didn’t grow when you expected them to, but eventually they do. There’s this constant cycle of thriving and fading, and you don’t always know why – sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. My father was very sensitive to that too. He always used to say, “Everything needs its time – and plants too.” And that’s really true. Over the years, you see that it takes many cycles before the same plant appears again, or sometimes it doesn’t come back at all.
Could we say that the plant also has “free will”?
You could say that, in a certain sense. I think so. We don’t really know why a plant sometimes doesn’t show up as we expect. Maybe it’s simply due to environmental reasons – too humid, too cold, or something like that, so it just can’t. In that sense, calling it “free will” might be a bit too…
Anthropocentric?
Yes. But I don’ believe in the concept of the free will, and the idea of autonomy. Also for humans, it isn’t so straightforward; it’s much more tricky. Humans are also highly influenced by their bio-technological surroundings and how they are raised.
As plants are. The environment, the atmosphere around them, the type of soil they’re in – that matters, right?
Yes, but maybe not in exactly the same way. For humans, conscious and unconscious thinking with the brain play an important role.
But the subject of the exhibition and the conference is exactly plant intelligence. How do you see it, and what is the difference compared to human intelligence?
That was an interesting discussion I had with Paco Calvo, a plant scientist, neuroscientist, and philosopher based in Murcia, Spain. He said that when we want to talk about plant intelligence, it’s important first to consider a general definition of intelligence – one that can be applied to multiple entities. From that general definition, we can then discuss the differences between species, rather than assigning a separate definition of intelligence to each one. Based on this, he proposed that plants are globally flexible.
He means that plants have a broader perspective – that they can adapt. But it’s not just automatic adaptation; they behave flexibly. Sometimes they adapt, and sometimes they don’t. This adaptation isn’t constant; it depends on the situation. Even if two situations might seem similar, they aren’t always exactly the same – yet the plant can adjust accordingly.
So I find this idea of global flexibility very interesting. I would also say that it’s important for human beings and could even help define human intelligence. It’s about not being stuck in a tunnel vision, but being able to perceive a situation and consider several ways to handle it. This is how I would define intelligence – as global flexibility, the ability to see a situation in its broader context, and to act accordingly.
Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Solarceptors. VR experience / single-channel projection, 2025
But you’re also interested in the aesthetic side of these ideas, and in how they could be visualized or interpreted in contemporary art. How long have you been working at the intersection of ecological thinking and contemporary art?
I think my first real exhibition on this subject was in 2007. It was called Ecomedia, and we curated it together with Sabine Himmelsbach and Karin Olenschläger. We were interested in how artists use technologies to visualize climate thinking or climate processes. So I’ve been working in this field for about 16 years. Thinking back to 16 years ago, it was the early days of what we now call the climate crisis – it wasn’t yet as urgent as it is today. Back then, the focus was more on climate in general, weather patterns, and the major elements like water, sea, and wind.
Later, I became increasingly interested in how artists deal with eco data, and then how plants behave – which is my main focus now. In a way, I realized that all these large systems and works of art were trying to show the extent of environmental damage. I also worked on waste, for example, the waste left behind by smartphones. Sometimes it was too depressing. So I found it helpful to focus on plant species that are often neglected. We usually don’t pay much attention to them, but they are really fascinating. I’ve always loved plants. I’ve always felt very close to plants. But I have to say, it’s not like I was always gentle with them. I wasn’t always careful. Still, I wanted to concentrate on their life forces, on their vitality.
In your new book “Technologies of Care”, you are writing that “the value of artistic practices of translation, distortion, and alienation, especially when they see themselves as accomplices in scientific research, does not lie in the visualization of scientific results and findings. Nor does it lie only in the transposition of “cold, abstract data” into a language that touches and (politically) activates. Rather, it lies in transducing, in transmaking, in making things indistinguishable and undecidable”. What do you mean by this “transmaking”?
I think the passage you quoted is about art – specifically eco art, and even more specifically, about artistic research like what Rasa Šmite does, for example. Rasa works closely with scientists, who provide her with data, for example in the work “Atmospheric forest” made together with Raitis Šmits. It’s an immersive VR installation, visualizing the complex interactions between a forest ecosystem, climate change, and the atmosphere. They use this data to create a VR environment where the situation is transformed, allowing us to experience the forest in a completely different way. Even though the VR environment isn’t exactly the same as the data, and it’s not the same as being in the forest itself, it creates something new. What I find interesting is that she doesn’t try to reproduce what the scientists say about the forest, or what an artist might say – instead, she creates a new reality. And this is what I mean by “transmaking.”
It’s about translating, in this case, the situation and data of a forest into something new – a kind of fantasy or imaginative experience. I should also say that she’s not the only one doing this – there are many artists working in a similar way. But artists don’t need to simply illustrate what scientists mean; they have their own interests. And I think this is where art differs from design. There are many design artists who visualize scientific concepts, and for me, that isn’t “transmaking.” They aim to make scientific ideas clear and understandable, producing films or works that seem to be realistic, but they are constructed, too. There are many interesting people doing this, but sometimes it can be too obvious – you immediately know what is going on. “Transmaking” does not make everything so transparent and obvious.
Karine Bonneval with Emilie Pouzetin in collaboration with researcher Eric Badel. Vertimus. Boucherouite rug, plywood apparatus, two pots, metal support, UV lamps, 2019. Photo: Kristīne Madjare
Speaking about the exhibition at Kim? Art Centre, which you co-curated with Raitis Šmits, I really enjoyed Karin Bonneval’s work Vertimus, where the performer tries to move like a plant. Of course, plants and humans live in different times, so the movements of a plant had to be sped up for us to see them. The dancer then tries to embody these movements.
I think it's nice and very important that people are trying to be like a plant, that they are trying to mimic the way how plants might be in the world. By doing this, they are also trying to think about how a plant might sense its surroundings and behave. It’s a form of personalization, so to speak – using your own body to explore another form of life. In this case, the performer and spectator know exactly that the human body is not a plant, but through this embodied practice, they can reflect on plant behavior and perception.
This is what art can do, especially in performative art – you can temporarily, as I say, mime another being. It’s also connected, perhaps, to older or archaic ways of thinking, where humans have always tried to personify other things: an animal, a plant, or even a stone. Yes, it’s pre-modern thinking, showing this old sense of kinship with the world around us. Or that we all come from the same origins – that’s one thing. The other is that miming is always a way of trying to understand. Children do it all the time: they mime what adults do. It’s their way of learning, of trying to understand, and also of imagining that they can become like them. It’s play – a playful way of being the other, while also not fully being the other. That’s what art can also do.
Zheng Bo (CN). Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen). Video (4K, color, sound), 16 min., 2021-22. Video still, courtesy the artist and Kiang Malingue
Actually, there’s another work that also kind of mimics the reality of plants and trees. I’m thinking of Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen) by Zheng Bo, where several performers are in the forest. I really love how the perspective is turned upside down in that piece.
Some parts of the work are about mimicry, others not. At the beginning, you see men entering the forest, naked, dancing, moving. Then they try to become like trees – lowering their heads, becoming sessile, very still. They make movements as if they are potted or seeded into the soil. I think it’s a beautiful approach. Later, the perspective is turned upside down, revealing the situation as a visual pattern. So, the piece performs also the emergence of new patterns, the morphing of forms. The “coming into form” is really central to plants – it’s a part of their intelligence that they shape themselves. And I think that piece captures this beautifully.
But at the exhibition there are also quite a lot of works using technologies – different ways of working with data and so on. How do you see plants in these times, when technologies and artificial intelligence are becoming more and more influential? What is the role of plants, and how will they survive in this new system that is emerging around us?
In general, if we are speaking of the plants, I think they will make it. Certain species will die or they died already. Others are coming. Maybe arctic zones will green, ice will go away. We can also observe this in Switzerland now that the ice is melting in the mountains, the mountains become greener. I mean, not very green, because it's very stony, there's a lot of debris. But it's always the first, the lichens and mosses. And so they are already coming up and they are preparing the field, the territory, so to speak, for the next ones. So maybe in a few hundred years we might have first trees there. So this is how it will be. Some die, others come.
But I find it sad that some have to die only because we want to maintain our own lifestyle – that we don’t give them the chance to live longer. They might be able to adapt if we gave them more time to prepare for this new reality. But because these changes are happening so fast, they simply don’t have the chance.
The biggest problem is that human beings, especially within capitalist and modern ways of thinking, don’t really think in generations. And I realize more and more that this is the real issue. Plants truly live through generations. Politicians and people in the dominant world systems and their technologies are always focused on preserving what they have right now.
But plants are truly intergenerational. Many of them return every season, and they have much longer life cycles. Trees, for example, can live for several hundred years – many plants are really old, five or even ten times older than a human being. So this also connects back to how we started – when we spoke about how plants live in a different time zone. Their time is now and tomorrow. That’s the rhythm of plants.
And technologies have a short lifespan – they are always wearing out, breaking down. Today the hype is around AI; tomorrow it will be something else. Technologies are always somehow reductionist – they simplify. But nonetheless, they are becoming living beings more and more, which we don’t understand. Plants, on the other hand, are much more complex. So this will never fit together if we continue to think only in a profit-oriented way.
Gints Gabrāns, Arnis Rītups. The Sower. Video and mycelium installation, 2023-2025. Courtesy of the artists
People are now very afraid of artificial intelligence – that it might develop a kind of superintelligence that doesn’t really care about Homo sapiens. At the same time, this also raises the question: maybe this superintelligence could survive in a world without plants?
I really think technologies need plants or natural elements, because on their own, they can’t generate energy. AI is voracious and extractivist per definition, consuming and wasting the Earth. Plants, on the other hand, always find a way to sustain themselves – they have the sun, they seek the resources they need. Technology, however, is completely dependent on external energy, whatever form that may be. Unlike technology, plants can create their own, our life. But homo economicus and his technologies are destroying the basics of our life.
So, you think that plants could be interesting for artificial intelligence – as some kind of models, role models in a way?
As role models for the conception of AI, yes – because they survive on their own. Plants could serve as models of other ways of independence, and dependence. I introduced plants as completely dependent beings: on the weather, the surrounding etc. But on the other hand, they are much more independent than technologies or humans are. And this is interesting, because all these modern ideas of freedom, independency, autonomy etc. are completely based on the “free” supply, i.e. dependence on fossil fuel and atomic power. This contradiction is completely neglected in the savior discourse of AI. This was also my starting point for this project: I was interested in older forms of intelligence – intelligence as a way of perceiving life and processing situations from a bigger perspective, being adaptable, coordinating, coming to decisions, and exhibiting intentional behavior. Machines can this too, but they are completely dependent on external fuel.
The RIXC “Plants Intelligence” exhibition in the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre. Photo: Kristīne Madjare
In your book, you write: “All practices – artistic, media-cultural, spiritual, activist, communal, reproductive, pedagogical – that try to break out of this economy of devaluation with playful aesthetic means, that pay attention to all of the Earth’s inhabitants and open us to transformations beyond simple promises of wholeness, I understand as caring practices: they produce and reproduce life.” Would you say that all this together forms a kind of system of knowledge that isn’t based solely on an anthropocentric way of thinking?
Yes, it is the introduction of other ways of knowledge based on respect. We may like plants or find them beautiful, but the reason we aren’t always kind to them, or don’t respect or venerate them, is that we lack a kind of spirituality – a belief in a world where every entity has its right to exist. Instead, we live in a hierarchical world, where we feel we need to extract things for our own benefit. I think we’ve lost rests of this perspective with the decline of religion, if we didn’t already lose all before. As a result, we no longer have established ways of paying respect to humans and non-humans who provide us with resources, intimacy, love, etc. This lack comes to the fore in our relationship with plants.
Now we need to pay attention to vernacular practices that help us show gratitude – to thank whoever provides for us. To thank a cow for giving milk, or the salad that we can eat. I think we’ve lost this sense of being grateful to nature, or to whoever shares with us what they have. Art can help us become aware of this, to develop aesthetic practices of gratitude. It can guide us toward a new culture of thankfulness, and to play with this.
Felipe Castelblanco (CO/US). Detrás de la Noche (Behind the Night). HD video. 16:9, 12:00 min, Spanish with English Subtitles. 2025. Video still. Courtesy of the artist
That’s why we’re also interested in pre-Christian kinds of cultures. We could mention another work from the exhibition – the video by Felipe Castelblanco, Detrás de la Noche (Behind the Night), filmed with multispectral cameras deep in the Peruvian Amazon. It also explores this field. But I think it’s also easy – going this way – to fall into a kind of exoticism. How do you avoid that and really engage deeply with this “old knowledge”?
Yes, I agree, in a certain sense. It’s interesting that people are now talking so much about indigenous thinking as an alternative. Dominant western religion has somehow fallen out of favor in our culture, probably because of its association with power, authority and oppression, or perhaps it just feels untimely. So it’s very difficult to make connections on that front. But there are still some people who do, and I think that can work. We saw this interest in other spiritualities back in the 1970s and the raising ecological awareness as well, especially in the US, where First Nations were really discriminated against. Now, these discussions are emerging again – and the life of First Nations is even more on the verge.
As you suggested, it’s very easy nowadays to always talk about far away indigenous religious practices, because they seem not to have a history with us. It doesn't have bad memories or memories of boredom. But I’m open to it, and appreciate the dialogue with our Indigenous partners, because there isn’t just one way to do things better.
Felipe Castelblanco (CO/US). Detrás de la Noche (Behind the Night). HD video. 16:9, 12:00 min, Spanish with English Subtitles. 2025. Video still. Courtesy of the artist
Do you look to the future in a positive way? Do you think there’s still a possibility to turn things around for the better?
Oh, that’s a really difficult question. I’m quite pessimistic. But I think we cannot give up. We have to fight for a better world. Even if it might not actually become better, we need to act as if it could.
Upper image: Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Still from AI Herbarium. Inventors of Their Own Existence, 2025. Courtesy of the artists.
