In this Plattform lecture, Giovanni Aloi offers an expansive introduction to critical plant studies through art history and contemporary artistic practice. Taking his recent book Botanical Revolutions as a point of departure, Aloi traces how plants have shaped the course of art — not only as motifs or materials, but as active agents that have transformed ways of thinking, making, and representing the world.
The online lecture and conversation, moderated by Silja Leifsdottir. The lecture is presented as part of Plattform, Bergen Kunsthall’s ongoing series for talks, lectures, and conversations, and in connection with the exhibition Iter Subterraneum.
Moving across examples from ancient mythologies, Indigenous knowledge systems, modern art, and contemporary practices, the lecture addresses themes such as anthropocentrism in art history, plant blindness, material agency, and the ethics of representation. Aloi discusses how artists have engaged with plants to challenge symbolic reduction, rethink authorship, and explore questions of identity, migration, indigeneity, and ecological responsibility.
Giovanni Aloi’s research focuses on the Anthropocene and new conceptions of nature in art. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (www.antennae.org.uk). Aloi is the author of Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019), Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020), Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art (edited with Michael Marder, 2023), Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking (2023), Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art (2025), Lawn (2025), and I’m Not an Artist: Reclaiming Creativity in the Age of Infinite Content (2025). He has contributed to PBS TV and BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.