Natural Othering of Plants: Human and Non-Human Decoupling in Artistic Research

The paper considers "natural othering" as a potential tool in mitigating anthropocentric views of nature. Rather than a human-centric view that exploits resources, it will consider the importance of othering as a recognition of the necessary separation to provide vegetal agency. Questioning the depiction of plants, via filmic technologies and its depiction on screen (from fiction to natural history documentaries), where time lapse photography grants access to the non-human temporal state of plant activity for human consumption, the paper
discusses the role of the 'electric plant' in terms of plant agency or otherwise. The paper considers the frameworks we can develop to mitigate anthropomorphisation through ethical othering and the role speculative fiction could play in revealing these potentials.
The paper contextualises artistic practice as a means to explore plant/human relations, between scientific study and popular culture, allowing for a consideration of the different forms of the othering of nature in documentary and fictional storytelling. The text/image work Orchid Unknown (2016) weaves factual accounts and fictional speculation to connect a group of detailed orchid models to a collection of miscellaneous reports related to economic botany and global colonial networks.The moving image artwork The Longest Living (2025), which draws on the same sources, utilises cinematic and televisual languages within the contexts of fiction and documentary. The use of models allows for a focus on nature's aesthetic value as an anthropocentric trait, embedded in the orchid's commodified social and cultural value. Transformative acts, within the narrative, aim to address broader implications of the distinction between 'artificial' and 'natural' and complications arising from separating human and non-human activity.
The paper considers the conventions of speculative fiction in both establishing of nature as instrumentalised anthropocentricism and as a space to recognise plants outside of an anthropocentric view. This investigation takes place in relation to the discourses of Marder, Määtä, Meeker and Szabari.