Published in Open Cultural Studies
This article explores different institutional approaches to exhibiting and maintaining living, plant-based sculptures, and installation art. By studying the creation and management of artworks by Gilberto Esparza, Michael Wang, Precious Okoyomon, and Daniel Lie, this article considers how cultural institutions can incorporate ethics of more-than-hu...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
This article explores intermediality and synaesthesia in James Joyce’s Ulysses, particularly focusing on the “Sirens” chapter. It examines how Joyce, akin to Johann Sebastian Bach’s innovative musical techniques and Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk concept, weaves a rich tapestry of sensory experiences through his narrative. Joyce’s use of intermed...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
Ulysses is widely accepted to be a book about everyday existence. Set on a single day, the novel portrays numerous mundane acts through its characters, and of these, smoking is included. Multiple characters smoke on June 16, 1904. Interestingly, typically as a social act, smoking is heavily involved in dialogues between characters. When Joyce’s cha...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
Mimouna is a North-African Jewish festival, which in the past symbolized good neighborly relationships between Jews and Muslims. Today, however, this festival has transformed into a neutralized interfaith encounter, resembling a culinary-focused musical show. The particular event explored in this case study was organized by an Israeli Reform Jewish...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
This article puts Werner Herzog’s films in dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to answer the question of how to dwell, to be at home with nature. I argue that an apathy–empathy aporia blockades the discussion of the nature–human relationship in Herzog’s cinema, which tends to view his representation of nature as either entirely apathetic to...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
This essay explores how artifice and queer form in Bertrand Mandico’s film The Wild Boys (2017. Dir. Bertrand Mandico. Ecce Films) interrogate more-than-human entanglements to orient viewers toward a trans ecology. In Mandico’s botanical imaginary, he crafts a world of excessive artifice where both the characters and the land in which they inhabit ...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
This article examines Virginia Woolf’s figurations of her writing process on the basis of her published diaries with particular attention to vegetal imagery and metaphor. Employing insights from critical plant studies, specifically the works of Michael Marder, and biosemiotics, specifically those of Wendy Wheeler, I investigate the image of fluid, ...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
Based on the “vegetal turn” in film studies and posthuman philosophy, the article explores how experimental cinema can be a cultural mediator of vegetal forms of life. Posthumanist philosophy draws inspiration from cinema’s portrayal of both imaginary and real non-human entities as subjects and cohabitants on Earth. As subjects, these non-human ent...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
Plantcare is having a moment. Recent years have seen an outpouring of audiovisual content across several social media platforms, wherein humans film and photograph themselves taking care of houseplants. These self-proclaimed “plant moms” build community through their shared passion for caring for houseplants and showing this form of tree-hugging to...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
This article invites readers to rethink the presence and role of soil by creating a soliumpoietics, without which terrestrial plant life itself struggles to occur. It utilizes both materialism/material agency and hyperobject lenses to analyze soil. In so doing it argues that these lenses may provide a more holistic understanding to better theorize ...
