Photo by Jaskaran (JK Photography) / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
The Archive of Critical Plantactions
Plants on the front lines of the living world
Plants in protest, resistance and political struggles
Plants in protest, resistance and political struggles
Every record in the archive, placed where it happened. Hover a plantaction to turn the globe to it, click to zoom in and open the record. The arcs are drawn between plantactions that share a plant. Drag to spin.
Critical plantactions are acts with plants that question, critique, and reimagine relationships between people, power, and the living world. They reveal how plants become material, symbolic, and performative participants in social, political, and environmental struggles.
The Archive of Critical Plantactions is a growing collection of photographs from around the world documenting how plants are used in protest, resistance, and political expression.
Plants have given their names to revolutions, stood at the center of struggles over land and resources, and been mobilized as material and symbolic forms of communication. Their presence in struggles across the globe reflects the ecological, cultural, and economic significance of plants within human societies.
Rooted in the concept of public pedagogy, the archive documents a wide range of critical contexts in which plants are used. It provides a framework for interpreting the past and imagining new ways of communicating with—and making meaning through—the botanical world.
The archive is an open resource for artists, designers, educators, researchers, and activists interested in the intersection of plants, politics, and public culture.
The term Plantaction emerged through the process of gathering and documenting news reports of protests, performances and civic gestures in which plants were used as a means of expression. Around 2019, I was increasingly encountering media articles and images of citizens, activists, farmers and students using flowers, fruits, crops and trees as materials of protest. I began archiving images of these critical events, which led me to ask how such acts might be understood and taught as a pedagogy with plants.
Faced with over two hundred articles and news reports, I skimmed each one for the action involving plants and began creating an archive of statements and images. Bite into turnips. Build a car skeleton with bamboo. Dump tomatoes on roads and run tractors over them. Lock up green chilies in cash boxes. This list of provocative, critical, and creative actions with plants drawn from real events across the world, traces how plants move between field, forest, garden, kitchen, street, home and body.
At the same time, while teaching, I used this archive to engage students with different aspects of the vegetal world. Students often added to the archive through their own research.
In 2024, my friend, artist and gardener Leslie Johnson, suggested that I embroider some of the documented actions from the archive. The list was vast and so I decided to focus on India where I live and work.
Many symbolic, performative, participatory and provocative acts with plants relate to the food we eat. Within the Indian context, these actions with plants occur within various agrarian crises across the country. Thus, I embroidered a selection of statements, one by one, onto ribbons made from burlap, a fabric associated with the storage of grain. It was while embroidering these statements that the idea of Plantaction emerged. Protests about food, demonstrations with vegetables, rituals with trees and pleas with flowers — a pattern of vegetal expression had begun to form. I used plantaction as a way to interpret these gestures, and what they represented collectively — critical, creative and provocative actions with plants.
Plantaction is thus both a concept and a method — a way of thinking through and acting with plants to create new dialogues between creative practices, our relationship with plants and the world we inhabit.