TERESA CASTRO, THE MEDIATED PLANT
A surprising animism is being reborn. We know now that we are surrounded by inhuman experience. - Jean Epstein
The struggle to think differently, to remake our reductionist culture, is a basic survival project in our present context.
Technologies, such as film, whose ultimate, paradoxical power has been, from its very beginning, the ability to re-enchant a disenchanted world, to enhance our perceptual possibilities,and suggest alternative, counter hegemonic ways of thinking about the world.
To survive and resist means to adjust, and to wrench ourselves loose from our monological, colonizing grip on ‘nature’.
Ultimately, we need to rebel against ourselves: maybe the mediated, sentient intelligent plant can help us to queer ourselves-as-humans, as we either… go onwards in a different mode of humanity, or not at all.
Slow motion and fast motion reveal a world where the kingdoms of nature know no boundaries. Everything lives.
The modern naturalists can no longer narrowly limit themselves to the study of plants or animals, because life, in its many aspects, solves the problem in a practical way, however varied it may be, and refutes our artificial separations and our classifications between plants, animals, and men.
It was the radical separation between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ that banished anthropomorphism to the barely accepted limits of reason and reduced it to a cognition problem common to children and ‘’primative people.’
A way of apprehending the diversity and alterity of life and the living, and a means of becoming otherly human.
The culturally constructed dimensions of what we understand the ‘natural’ and ‘nature’ to be, help us to radically rethink identities, who and what we are, who and what we can become.