This paper examines the activist instrumentalisation of plants in a selection of recent art works and artistic interventions realised within urban contexts. A common denominator for these is that they seem to play with or imitate the unsanctioned approaches of subcultures or activist groupings with their various critical addresses to established structures and hierarchies. But while these other types of engagement within urban space often have a political or social scope, the works dealt with in this paper exceed the confines of anthropocentric issues and relations. Instead, they redirect attention towards some of most overlooked and devalued co-inhabitants in cities: plants – and most notably those perceived by many to be less worthy of a place in the urban ecosystem: weeds. This paper is part of the rising field of studies (e.g., Bengtsen, 2018) that examines urban and street art's potential to affect our consciousness of environmental concerns and our own agency within our biotic community.

In the aftermath of the bombings of London during the Second World War, different types of weeds propagated on the sites that had been demolished by the explosions. One of the most common plants in these locations was the species rosebay willowherb that soon became known by the popular name “bomb weed” in the local population (Mabey, [2010] 2012: 23). A similar case is that of the cogon grass that took over huge areas of former rain forest that had been destroyed by the American army's diffusion of Agent Orange – a mixture of herbicide, free dioxins, and turpentine – during the Vietnam war.⁠¹ And then there is of course the almost mythic ginko biloba, the oldest surviving species of trees with ancestors dating back 270 million years, located about no more than one kilometre from the hypocentre of the atomic bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima in 1945, yet astonishingly survived. While the story of the ginko biloba trees has become emblematic and a symbol of hope for surviving in the middle of the terrifying catastrophe, it is not a unique case. According to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) about 170 trees survived within a radius of around two kilometres from the centre, in most of the cases because the roots underground were unaffected, even though the exposed part above the ground was in many cases, damaged (UNITAR, 2018). In Japanese, these trees are referred to as “hibakujumoku” (“A-bombed trees”) and in English as “survivor trees”. In addition to the surviving trees, the oleander flower was the first to proliferate in the affected area, and it has since been designated as the official flower of Hiroshima.

The surprising resurgence of plant life in Hiroshima is echoed in recent discoveries from the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant. An explosion in the core of a reactor on the 26th of April 1986 caused a significant radioactive emission, and in the aftermath of the accident an exclusion zone with a radius of thirty kilometres was established around Chernobyl. When the zone was reopened a few years ago, researchers found that specific plants, for instance the local arabidopsis had adapted to the high concentrations of ionising radiation. The French photographer and artist Anaïs Tondeur has documented the plants that were collected by researchers studying the biology of the affected area in her work Chernobyl Herbarium. The work consists of a series of 31 rayograms – direct imprints on photosensitive plates – of different plant species growing in the exclusion zone and collected by a team of researchers with the purpose of studying the impacts of high levels of radioactivity (Marder & Tondeur, 2016).

These and many more examples support myths of how specific plant species – in particular weeds or wild growing plants – may demonstrate a remarkable power of resistance to humanly caused catastrophes with their ability to survive local and temporary apocalyptic conditions. As the author of the book Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants, Richard Mabey,points out, we tend to regard weeds as defiant; “Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness.” (Mabey, [2010] 2012: 20). Endowing plants with properties and characteristics, such as will or determination, that would usually be reserved for human beings, is to anthropomorphise plants. Vegetal defiance is by all probability a matter of perception and must be assumed to presuppose some kind of human agency. Nevertheless, the question of plant “intelligence” or “sensibility”, understood as the ability to respond to external factors and perhaps even to some degree communicate with other fellow species through their roots, or with fungi as intermediaries, is a subject that has preoccupied researchers for decades. Authors and artists have also long used plants and animals to serve as mouthpieces for social or political critique or as metaphors for, or allegories of, the human sphere with its social organisation and behaviours. Whereas the instrumentalisation of plants as a phenomenon within literature and arts has various historical predecessors, recent examples seem to point towards a new trope, and a new rhetorical figure. As I seek to demonstrate in this paper, it seems characteristic of this new trope that the figured or implied plants do not necessarily serve as referents for something that is exterior or other to their own sphere. Instead, they seem to be entangled in an artistic endeavour to scrutinise the semiosis between plants and human beings, and, just as importantly, the interconnection between nature, state institutions, aesthetics, and capitalism.

In her article “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces” Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe argues that any given social constitution will necessarily be made up of different conflicting and unreconcilable hegemonic projects, in spite of the smooth image of unity that corporate capitalism attempts to spread (Mouffe, 2007: 3). Mouffe emphasises the arts as a potential means to disclose oppositions and pluralism through different kinds of counter-hegemonic practices or interventions:

According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony (Mouffe 2007: 2).

Chantal Mouffe's confidence in the potential of arts to challenge the dominant hegemonies through re-appropriations or occupations of public space recalls the Situationist approach in the late 1950s. Like Mouffe, the Situationists regarded artistic practice as a political tool and as a means to reconquer urban space. They rejected the dominance of capitalist logics in public spaces and considered the urban sphere as an important battlefield in the resistance to consumption culture. In their view, the rational principles imposed by capitalism inspired a conformist life style, characterised by passive consumerism and segregation between citizens. The Situationists wanted to abolish capital exchange and competition among citizens and instead strengthen creativity, dynamism and perpetual recreation:

More than an integration of the arts and techniques into urbanism, it is the broadening of the concept of urbanism to a total art of a radically new genre. And more than an art form, it is the collective way of a new society. A way in movement, far from the individual arts of today, and a perpetual play with the life inspired by the changing events that we ourselves generate (Nieuwenhuys, 1959: 129)⁠²

In addition to this, they also advocated the need to create new situations and atmospheres and introduced the concept of “psychogeographic drifting” as a means to reconquer public space. Drifting implied passing from one environment to the other, wandering about – either alone or in the company of others – without a specific purpose or destination; to seek the unknown, the mysterious, and adventure. The old city centres were considered by the Situationists to be particularly suitable for this kind of drifting with their labyrinthine qualities.

The in situ work Black Box Garden by the Danish artist Camilla Berner(Figure 1) seems to display traces of this kind of psychogeographic drifting; or in any case, of a more casual and random strolling on informal paths across an urban space. The work was realised on a deserted building lot in the central part of Copenhagen and took place from early spring until late fall in 2011. The site, one of the most expensive in Copenhagen, had been abandoned since 2004 when a planned construction project was rejected after a heated public debate on its architectural qualities and adaption to the surroundings.

Berner transformed the site into an urban garden – although neither a regular ornamental garden with decorative flowers nor a community garden with vegetables and greens. Instead she cultivated the wild plants that had taken over since the site was abandoned. She did not bring in anything new – no seeds nor construction materials – from the outside, but used only what was already present on the site. In the midst of the wildness, she established a network of small, irregular paths, where people living in the neighbourhood had already trotted down the vegetation passing through, walking their dogs, etcetera, as a registration of the movements across the site. While the paths at once referred to gardens and cultural landscapes, they also indicated a demonstrative rejection of the rigid, rational order that predominates much modern urban planning – for example, the grid-like organisation of North American cities like New York – and opposed it by a spontaneous, rhizomatic order. Although Berner's interventions might be seen as an “occupation” of an urban space, this occupation was only temporary – it lasted only a season of growth – and she refrained from taking possession over the site by imposing her own fixed framework on to it.⁠³ Rather, she reinvested it as a democratic, non-hierarchical space, “giving it back” to the local population through a formalisation of the inhabitants' own paths. The paths came to symbolise the reconquering and rehabilitation of the multitude.

Deserted buildings and building lots in cities often seem to invite being taken over by alternative or counter-cultural groupings and communities, just as they lend themselves readily to different kinds of aesthetic investigations into the socio-economic interests and power structures governing cities and public spaces, as illustrated by the Black Box Garden. But the backdrop of an aestheticised romantic landscape-style garden can be an equally efficient locus for “counter-hegemonic” practice, although in a somewhat different manner. The Finnish artist Hanna Husberg's work Culture Hors Sol from 2010 is an example of this. It was installed in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris as part of an exhibition program focused on biodiversity. Husberg gathered plants of the species Japanese knotweed from different locations in the city and transplanted them to a floating structure made from EPS, rockwool, and plastic in an artificial lake in the park. At the time Japanese knotweed had been classified in France as an invasive species that was to be exterminated, but Husberg circumvented the rules by transplanting the small knotweed plants into a “safe zone.” In this way, the plants' most basic needs for water and light were ensured even though the plants did not take root directly in the ground. Husberg explained that the culture-without-soil method has been used for cultivation by the Aztecs and by various militaries to produce food in arid regions during wars, just as NASA is examining its potential in possible future colonisations of other planets (Husberg, 2018).

Although the floating plant colony might have appeared as an artificial construction in contrast to the natural, landscape-like environment of the Buttes-Chaumont park, the difference was illusory. The park is just as much a construction as the knotweed plantation. It was conceived in 1867 under the reign of Napoleon III by his director of public works in Paris, Jean-Charles Alphand, as an imaginary landscape where the inhabitants of the growing city – and particularly the new vast 19th and 20th arrondissements – could come for recreation and leisure activities under the impression of being in a remote natural setting.⁠⁴ The site was a former refuse dump and a depository for sewage, just as a part of it had been a quarry where gypsum and limestone were mined for the construction of buildings. The work commenced in 1864 and about a thousand workers assisted in re-sculpting the landscape; digging the artificial lake, shaping the sloping lawns and hillsides, and transforming the former quarry into a dramatic, steep mountain, rising 50 meters above the lake – with pointed cliffs, and an interior grotto, through the use of explosives. Water was led, by means of hydraulic pumps, from the nearby canal de l'Ourcq and lifted up to the highest point of the mountain to create an impressive waterfall. Thousands of trees, shrubs and flowers were planted and a miniature Roman temple erected on top of the mountain, completing the fictive landscape.

Whereas the park imitates a real, natural landscape, Hanna Husberg's small ecosystem of unwanted knotweed plants seems more transparent in regards to its own constructed nature with its rigid and mechanical disposition that could have been drawn from the scenario of a futurist fiction film. Husberg's work seems to challenge the cultural perception of plants and the natural environs – what is considered to be natural or artificial, and who has the power to decide what is, or what is not? At the same time, the work also seems to question the national or supranational EU blacklists of plants which in some contexts, and at certain times, are considered useful, beautiful, resistant etcetera and in others suddenly become unwanted because they are considered as threats to a given local ecosystem. As Tao Orion notes in her book, Beyond the War on Invasive Species, there is, to this day, “no unambiguous, scientifically defensible definition of what constitutes an “invasive species” (Orion, 2015: 48). In her view, the existing research within the field of invasive ecology is characterised by a striking lack of objectivity as well as by inconsistent terminology. She is critical not only towards the application of the term “invasive” as such, but also of its use, noting that the most widely accepted definition of an invasive species is one “whose introduction causes economic or environmental harm or harm to human health” (here, Orion cites the US Department of Agriculture (USDA, 2014).

However, this ‘official’ definition, from the USDA, seems more subjective than objective. Whose economic health? Does it refer to enterprising small farmers developing cottage industries based on available resources or, more likely, to multinational agribusinesses that need to eradicate “weeds” in order to maintain their bottom line? And how do you measure environmental harm or harm to human health, especially relative to the unknown, but likely damaging, effects of massive herbicide-based eradication campaigns? (Orion, 2015: 48). Invasive weeds and the influence of the herbicide industry on the national and supranational institutions are controversial subjects, and although Culture Hors Sol might seem tounderact its own criticality, it is nevertheless an orchestration of civil disobedience – at least on a symbolic or referential level.

Culture Hors Sol is to some degree paralleled by the conceptual, interventionist work of the artist collective And And And, whose small bags containing goldcurrent wild tomato seeds were sold in the exhibition bookstore during dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012. At first sight, the seed bags seemed innocent with their pastel coloured decorative drawings of branches of golden tomatoes and inept, colourful handwriting. But at a closer reading of the different handwritten statements it becomes clear that the artist collective endeavours to sow seeds of resistance:

BUYING, PAYING FOR SEEDS DOES NOT MEAN OWNING THE SEEDS, A SEED IS NOT A PRODUCT, A SEED IS NOT ANYONE'S PROPERTY [STOP], A SEED BELONGS TO ITSELF, IF YOU PLANT IT WILL BECOMING BECOMING” / “PRIVATIZATION OF SEEDS, OF SEAS, OF WATER, OF CULTURE, OF FORESTS, OF POLITICAL DECISIONS” / “UNCONTROLLABLE MINORITIES, CONSTANTLY EMERGING AND SHAPING WHAT BECOMES OF THE SEEDS OF REVOLUTIONARY BECOMINGS, EXCLUDED FROM HISTORY, RE-EMERGING IN UNEXPECTED FORMS, THE SEEDS OF CHANGE.

The bookshop at a big international art event is obviously not just any regular public space. It is an exclusive, privileged space and even those visitors to the exhibition area who dropped by the bookshop might not necessarily have noticed the small, discrete seed bags in their stand. But the point in selling the seeds in the shop is nevertheless an important underlining of the political message distributed with the tomato seeds; that the seeds – and maybe nature in a larger sense – cannot be owned by anyone. And at the same time, it appears as an ironic or paradoxical twist to commercialise them in the same way that multinational companies commercialise seeds for specific selected crops and vegetables and, in a certain sense, colonise nature both through patents on plants and by contributing to a monoculture that has had a devastating effect on biodiversity on a global scale. The And And And artist collective uses the same strategy as the system it criticises in order to get its message through. Their use of miniature writing appears as an ironic paraphrasing of the fact that what is written in fine print is often the most important (and the most controversial) details. Just as Buttes-Chaumont park (where Hanna Husberg's work was installed) isn't as “natural” as it pretends to be, the seeds commercialised by the multinational seed companies are often far from innocent. The conventional seeds are to different degrees improved, genetically engineered, and in some cases patented, although this information is often obfuscated.

The choice of the tomatoes as political messengers might be seen as a reference to the first guerrilla gardening movement, the “Green Guerrillas”, founded by Liz Christy in New York in 1973. Christy and her companions made seed bombs, or “seed green-aid” as they called them, from condoms that were stuffed with tomato seeds and fertiliser, and threw them over fences onto empty lots and disused sites in order to spread new life and growth on the deserted sites. The tomatoes are also at the centre of another example of the subversive instrumentalisation of plants – the French author Nathalie Quintane's essayist book Tomates (2010), in which she established an analogy between tomato plants and political activism – in particular the Tarnac Group. In the book, she explains how to make organic nettle purine:

You gather some nettles (wearing gloves), you cut them roughly and then you chop them – I put them in a bowl and I cut with scissors? - No no, poor you, that would take way too much time, you chop them roughly and you can also mix it, you add a few dandelions, plantains that you have in your garden… Quintane, [2010] 2014: 13-15⁠⁵

But what might at first hand appear as innocent garden advice to create a fertile ground for growing tomatoes is in fact an act of civil disobedience in response to a new set of regulations adopted with the aim of preventing the sale and transmission of recipes on organic purine in France. When Quintane wrote her book, a new decree had recently been adopted by the government. It stated that any kind of commercialisation or transmission should require the possession of a certificate of product conformity. As the certificate was both expensive and practically impossible to obtain, the regulations were by many considered as a de facto ban.⁠⁶ Nathalie Quintane's transmission of her recipe on nettle purine is thus a direct demonstration of defiance even though it is not manifested through a physical action but as a linguistic articulation – as a written speech act. Tomates can thus be regarded as a case of discursive, “performative” writing that addresses its audience in a direct manner and confronts the dominant political and economic power structures.

Whereas Nathalie Quintane appears as a highly visible author of her agonist articulations, the Austrian artist Lois Weinberger is a much more discreet author of his works; he often withdraws from the “situations” he establishes. In Ruderal Enclosure (Figure 2) made for the annual Salzburg festival Scene Salzburg in 1993 (and again in 1997 for documenta X in Kassel), he broke up a few square metres of asphalt on the Anton-Neumayr-Platz in the middle of Salzburg and left the “exploded” square to be taken over by spontaneous growth from seeds brought to the spot by the wind or by birds. The square was framed by a metal fence, possibly to prevent people from mounting upon or interfering with the small demarcated piece of nature that arose from the debris of the destructed spot – and perhaps also to create an – at least symbolic – separation between the human cultural sphere and the sphere of nature.

The scenario resembles the post-war urban environments mentioned in the beginning of this article, however with the important difference that in this case it was a planned and staged situation. Weinberger has provoked the collapse as a means for “scraping off” the existing socio-cultural layer in order to make way for a new spontaneous order, which emerges beyond human interference and control; he reboots nature and allows it to grow anew from a point zero. Instead of giving an area or site back to the local inhabitants, as Camilla Berner for instance does, Weinberger gives it back to nature itself. His non-presence can thus be regarded as a conscious strategy to withdraw from the situation or the “other space” he establishes in order to avoid imposing a new hierarchy or authorship which would conflict with the central idea of the work – that human agency is restricted to an engaging in creating a frame or a framework for allowing nature to resurrect by and from itself.

In another work, Mole Hills, Berlin (Figure 3) the artist established a similar series of ruptures or seemingly natural “disturbances” within an urban environment: a series of irregularly dispersed mole hills on an unspecified site – perhaps a parking lot?⁠⁷ But at closer sight, it becomes clear that the scenario doesn't seem possible. The mole hills have emerged on an asphalt-covered terrain and although plants sometimes manage to somehow breakthrough in impossible places, it hardly seems probable that a mole would be able to work its way through this kind of surface. As it is the case with weeds, mole hills are often considered to be a nuisance when they occur in locations where they interfere with the human-made order (in a lawn, flower bed etcetera). But, as with weeds, moles do not really show any respect whatsoever in regards to human interests and systems. Weinberger's interventions seem to operate as reminders of the natural processes and organic growth that has been forced out, or repressed, and thus have come to occupy the place of the outlaws or subversive undercurrents that threaten man-made and capitalist rational order.

With their direct and interventionist character, the works discussed thus far might appear as ramifications of the early environmentalist movement that arose in the 1960s and 70s, together with the increasing scientific knowledge of the environmental consequences of the exploitation of natural resources. This rising concern was reflected by a number of popular scientific and philosophical publications – some of the best known being Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962); Donella H. Meadows' The Limits to Growth (1972); Arne Næss' Ecology, Society and Lifestyle (1974); and James Lovelock's Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). This period also witnessed the proliferation of grassroots activism, for instance the seed bombing and guerrilla gardening movements in New York in the 1970, the establishment of a number of non-governmental environmental organisations, and the formation of new “green” political parties in several Western countries. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it also had repercussions within the arts – in the development of land art and earth works, and in the evolving field of ecological art. However, whereas land and earth works were often located in remote rural settings, the works dealt with in this paper are ingrained in urban contexts.

Not only are these works implanted in different urban contexts, they also seem to share an activist approach – at least in the sense of a conscious play with signs and connotations of the unsanctioned and rebellious. They operate on the frontiers of activism and defiance, and in some cases even break laws (Camilla Berner's Black Box Garden and Hanna Husberg's Culture Hors Sol) or simulate resistance and deconstruction of the smooth, established order (Lois Weinberger's Ruderal Enclosure and Mole Hills, Berlin). However, only in a few cases (Nathalie Quintane's Tomates and And And And's goldcurrent wild tomato seed bags) has this resistance been articulated in a clear and unambiguous way.

These bio-activist interventions use different tools and strategies than those usually associated with activism – demonstrations, blockades, distribution of tracts, posters, graffiti and, in the more radical cases, occupations, vandalism etcetera. Instead, they may take on a multitude of shapes, and appear in a multitude of contexts. Whereas conventional activism, however planned it might have been at the outset, often seems to be characterised by a certain degree of unpredictability and spontaneity as it develops, artistic activism, at least in the cases discussed here, seems to a larger extent to follow a set of conceptual and aesthetic outlines for the work drawn in advance. Furthermore, formal and aesthetic principles seem to play a significant role, while the agonistic content to some degree seems subordinated to these. However, this does not necessarily weaken the counter-hegemonic potential of these works – it may in fact even strengthen the potential for further bio-activist articulations occurring in unexpected contexts and in a variety of manifestations.

In large cities, such as Barcelona and Paris, herbicides are no longer used to extinguish weeds in public areas in order to protect biodiversity, and weeds are starting to become a common feature in the urban environment. In Bordeaux, the local authorities distribute wild flower seeds to attract honey bees and pollinators, and encourage citizens to spread the seeds in public areas. In Paris, local authorities have started to “outsource” public space to local citizens, who can apply, for free, for a “permis de végétaliser” [permit for planting] for different public spaces, mainly in the disused areas along the roads, between trees etcetera. The inspiration for these new initiatives seems clear. Collectives such as the Green Guerrillas no longer have a monopoly on this kind of urban rebellion and re-appropriation of common spaces. Now, not only artists, but also local authorities in different cities are imitating their strategies and methods. Just as multinational companies increasingly adopt the strategies and codes deployed by subcultures for use in marketing campaigns (Mouffe, 2007), local authorities and municipalities in different cities are now similarly adopting activist, subcultural practices by distributing seeds and encouraging citizens to contribute to the seed bombing of deserted and uncultivated areas – and thus to invest sites and spaces with new meaning and value. Whereas according to Mouffe, the appropriation of the subcultural means that critical power is neutralised, it might be that these new currents could lay the foundations for a fruitful critical alliance between local authorities and citizens.