In the Making #16: Plant Intelligence and Vegetal Re-enlightenments

Thursday night sessions on research in art

* Image credit: “Borrachero Dreams” by Felipe Castelblanco. In the framework of the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence, IAGN HGK Basel FHNW

ITM #16 – March 12th, 19:00

Plant Intelligence and Vegetal Re-enlightenments

With Felipe Castelblanco

The third session of In the Making will feature the work of multidisciplinary artist, researcher and filmmaker Felipe Castelblanco, who is currently Postdoctroal artistic resarcher at the Institute Art Gender Nature at the HGK Basel FHNW, in the context of the project Plant Intelligence.

The Amazon rainforest is a space where plants and humans co-create and communicate in unlikely ways. Together, they produce territories, heal, and form alliances that render the forest as a pluriversal space of vegetal resistance, mutualism and intelligibility. In this context, artist and researcher Felipe Castelblanco explores vegetal ontologies via nocturnal plant fluorescence, expanded cinema and participatory research to investigate unseen vegetal capacities that sustain biocultural relations and re-energize human–plant co-existence.

The session will start with a presentation by Felipe Castelblanco and a screening of his work, and will continue with a panel dialogue with a group of young artist researchers elaborating on questions that concern the articulation of intelligence, sensoriality and the more than human in an exploration of the vegetal domain.

Bio

Felipe Castelblanco (b. 1985, Bogotá) is a Basel-based multidisciplinary artist and researcher, whose practice operates at the intersection of cinema, eco-socially engaged art, and territorial research. He is a lecturer at the MA Transversal Design at IXDM, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW and Postdoctoral fellow with the SNF-funded project Plants_Intelligence, IAGN FHNW. Felipe holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and earned a PhD from Kunstuniversität Linz (Austria) and the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, exploring avenues for epistemic justice in the Colombian Pan-Amazon region. www.plants-intelligence.ch, www.felipecastelblanco.com