Event | UVA Arts

Join the artist collective nonhumanities for a guided encounter with Morven's overlooked plant life through participatory scores, vegetal attention practices, and collective tending.

Space is limited. Participants must register in advance.

What should I do to prepare for the event?

- Before you come, watch the film at phytoturgies.com. We recommend watching it a few days before the event.

How long will the event last?

- The event will last about 2 hours.

What should I bring?

We recommend:

- Comfortable clothes and walking shoes

- Your own water bottle (we'll have water and snacks available)

- Personal bug spray and sunscreen if you have sensitivities (we'll have some to share)

- A hat for extra sun protection

- The path has some shade, but you'll want sun protection for the open areas.

Is there an age requirement?

We recommend participants be at least 14 years old, those under 18 must be accompanied by a guardian.

Please contact Katie Schetlick at kbs2d@virginia.edu with any accessibility concerns.

ABOUT

phytoturgies is a project by nonhumanities (Katie Schetlick, Anna Hogg, and Conrad Cheung, in consultation with Anik Sparrman) that combines installation, performance, and video to activate and reimagine public relationships to the plant life of Morven Sustainability Lab, a vast landscape of unceded Monacan land developed into a slave plantation at the turn of the 19th century. Recycling the materials of nonhumanities’ past project series point to touch…, phytoturgies focuses attentional and performative tools on the overlooked and unspectacular but ecologically essential plant life that constitute the majority of Morven’s landscape.

Accompanied by a video that acts both as invitation into phytophilic logics and as partial score, the project’s performances bring the public from the institutional core of Morven's main house and formal gardens to its disused former entryway, spaces that trace both colonial logics of arrival and contemporary efforts at sustainability. Slow, multisensory engagements unfold along the route: guided walks, propagation practices, and embodied acts that ask participants to linger, hold, kneel, and gather. Refusing neoliberal framings of sustainability and methods of extractive identification, phytoturgies embraces propinquity as a precondition for interspecies understanding — being in the space of, and so becoming with, another.