From Houseplant to Lover: Bioartists taking their relationship with plants to the next level
From food, to medicine, to aesthetic beauty, humans have a long history of growing, manipulating, and using plant life for our own personal benefit. Is it possible for the plant-human relationship to get even more intimate than this?
The following bioartists reimagine our relationship with plants as a reciprocal collaboration in which both species can benefit romantically and/or sexually.
Botany for lonely people
Is there a way to engineer a plant that can love you back? What if you could convince a plant to grow towards you, as if you were the sun?
These are only a few of the questions currently being investigated by American artist and researcher Ani Liu. With her project, The Botany of Desire, Liu set out to create a novel situation in which a plant could reciprocate her physical acts of love. The artist did this by designing a new lipstick. The ingredients of the lipstick include some of the active compounds necessary to stimulate plant hormones involved in growth and the regulation of blooming and flowering. When a person wearing this lipstick kisses a plant, it is then stimulated to grow from/ or blossom in the location of the kiss.
This deliberate act of bioengineering allows the wearer to communicate with the plant in its own chemical language, and share an intimate moment of physical connection.
The Botany of Desire by Ani Liu, (c) The Artist, image link
Sexual aids for plants
Plant Sex Consultancy is a collaborative project by artists Pei-Ying Lin, Špela Petrič, Dimitris Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss. In this work, the artists question the difficulties associated with plant reproduction — plants are immobile and largely rely on external forces, like pollinators and the movements of wind and water, for reproduction.
The artists consider ways that biotechnology can aid in the sexual pleasure and overall success of plant reproduction, and based on this, design prosthetics to enhance the plant’s natural sexual features. The prosthetics reference both medical and sex toy aesthetics, and are meant to use humour and absurdity to project human-centered ideas of sex onto plant life.
In this example, the consultancy designed “Vanity Lace” to be placed over carnation flowers that are infected with fungus, in order to prevent pollinators from spreading the fungus to other flowers, effectively halting the spread of plant STIs.
Vanity Lace for Carnation: PSX Consultancy by Pei-Ying Lin, Špela Petrič, Dimitris Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss, 2014 (c) The Artist, image link
Will your houseplant ever love you back?
Photo by Cameron Ahlvers on Unsplash
In each of these projects, the artists involved explore ideas of mutual care and support between plants and humans, at times anthropomorphising the plants, assuming their needs and desires to be similar to our own. Through the playful absurdity of these actions, the artists probe the boundaries of interspecies interventions, drawing attention to questions like: What does it say about humans to crave non-human intimacy? Where does this desire to impose care come from?
It is unlikely that your plants will be able to reciprocate your human love in a language that you can understand anytime soon, but maybe the more important question is, why do you wish they could?