Rooted Beings gallery captions

This exhibition is a collaboration with La Casa Encendida, Fundación Montemadrid. This exhibition has been produced in line with environmentally sustainable practices. We have reused structures from previous exhibitions, and where this was not possible, we have prioritised recyclable materials.

British Sign Language

Please join artist Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq as she introduces the gallery and interprets some of the audio artworks in the exhibition. Look out for the QR code and BSL symbol next to the artworks.

700 million years ago

Photosynthetic marine organisms – green algae – emerge. 

450 million years ago

The first terrestrial plants develop. They don’t have a vascular system capable of transporting water, so grow in humid environments. 

251 million years ago

Seed-carrying plants become dominant.  

66 million years ago

Vast ecosystems of savannahs and grasslands become established, where animals can flourish. Conifers become dominant in colder climates, while angiosperms – plants with flowers – prevail in tropical climates.  

300,000 years ago

First humans evolved. 

13,000 years ago

Agriculture begins.

19th century

The Anthropocene Era: human activity has a global impact on terrestrial ecosystems. 

Present day

Biodiversity loss and climate change impact planetary and human health, and increase the risk of future pandemics.  

‘fragment-A’ was created through ‘bashment’, an appropriated knapping technique used to process and reassemble salvaged materials from nearby construction sites. It underlines the entanglement of human activity and “material lives” (the cultural and political meaning of a material, beyond its physical or chemical properties) in our built and unbuilt environments.  

‘Bashment' plays on the Germanic root of knapping, knopp, or “to strike”, and the Jamaican Patois term for dancehall music and raving. RESOLVE describe bashment as a creolising of the knapping method. Martiniquais philosopher Edouard Glissant’s definition of creolisation moves beyond the merging of different cultures, to one that focuses on ‘errantry’. For RESOLVE, this means a process of making that uproots conventional perspectives on the making unnatural of so-called ’natural’ materials. 

This work is part of an ongoing research programme ‘What the Wild Things Are’, which excavates wilderness in the city. 

Ingela Ihrman’s algae installations were conceived during a period of research and convalescence on the Swedish coast at Malmö and the Koster Islands, and on the Isle of Eigg in Scotland. They investigate links between her intestinal flora and marine flora.  

Fieldwork documentation of the artist collecting seaweed samples 
Photography by Sebastian Dahlqvist 

Symbiosis

We live in symbiotic relationships with plants, from their role in the air we breathe, to our use of them in food and medicine. 

Thirteen thousand years ago, humans began domesticating plants through agriculture. Agricultural cycles shaped the modern world and, in turn, rooted human culture, as farming replaced the nomadic hunter-gatherer existence.  

Plants exist in mutually beneficial relationships with the world around them: sharing resources via complex networks of mycorrhizal fungi and benefiting from animal interactions, such as pollination. 

Humans also have the capacity to nurture ecosystems, but our way of life has led to the extinction of many species. The ‘Anthropocene’ is a term used to describe this period in Earth’s history when human activity has started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Philosophers are now calling for the ‘Symbiocene’, a period of reintegration between humans and all living beings. 

Gözde İlkin

Gözde İlkin collects found textiles from domestic environments and uses embroidery, painting, collage and natural dyes to create visions that transcend human, animal and plant categories. İlkin describes the fabrics as ‘stages’, spaces for the elusive, fantastic beings she creates to inhabit. These works expand her interest in plant intelligence and interspecies symbiosis, and question power relations, gender identity and urban transformations. 

Linens, curtains and tablecloths, sewn and collaged by Ilkin and her mother, blend together a variety of ancestral materials and technical knowledge. Combining meanings from different cultures, each piece becomes a story that inhabits the intermediate spaces between plants and people, mourning and birth, the dead and the living. The radiant colours are made using extracts of medicinal and ceremonial plants, referencing the healing and transformative power ascribed to plants during shamanic rituals.

on right: 
‘The Ground Opening: Mourning and Birth’

on left, from front to back: 
‘Stone of Vacuity’
‘Opening the Sky: Dance of the Dormant Seeds’
‘The Tide, Myself’s Several People’
‘Shaman’
‘The Entrustment Shaman’
‘Bridge’ 

Ecosystems on land are founded on fungi. They served as root systems for plants for tens of millions years, until they evolved their own. Today, over 90 per cent of plants depend on underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Wood Wide Web’, these networks can transfer water, carbon, nitrogen and other nutrients between plants.  

Wood-rotting fungi break down wood, releasing nutrients into the environment, which supports new growth. Fungi can even help restore contaminated ecosystems in the emerging fields of ‘mycoremediation’ and ‘mycofiltration’. 

Originally called the “humble bee orchid”, this species was given its name because the flowers mimic a female bee, both in scent and appearance. The male bee is tricked into landing on the flower in an attempt to mate with it. When the bee moves on to another plant, it transfers pollen from the first orchid to the next. In the absence of a suitable insect pollinator, bee orchids are able to self-pollinate. 

This papyrus is thought to be the earliest existing fragment of an illustrated herbal used for medical purposes. One side shows a coloured drawing of ‘symphytum’, thought to be Symphytum officinale, or comfrey which has been valued in traditional medicine for its anti-inflammatory, analgesic and astringent properties. The reverse shows a plant labelled “flommos“. It is an ancient example of our instrumental relationship with plant life. 

Jainism teaches that plants, animals and elements like air and water, as well as humans, have souls – jiva. One of the five principles of Jainism is ahimsa or nonviolence towards any living entity. 

This extensively inscribed concentric diagram depicts Jambudvipa, or the “land of Jambu trees”. Jambudvipa is the realm of human beings in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cosmology. This tradition of illustration dates back more than 1,200 years.  

Ingela Ihrman created this passion flower costume as part of a series of ‘blooming’ performances. The artist describes the act of dressing up as a flower as one of intimacy and attraction. She states that it is about how it feels to be “an artist, a human, a woman, a body, it’s about fertility, death and puberty, to have desires and looking for ways to attract”. 

Like many other flowering plants, Passifloras produce a sweet liquid in their honey glands, situated at the base of the petals, in order to attract pollinators. When performed, the costume is activated by the artist, transforming it from bud to bloom. The audience is invited to drink ‘nectar’ from the flower once the petals have opened, to become the pollinators.  

Colonial violence and indigenous knowledge

European scientific expeditions to Latin America in the 18th century collected hundreds of botanical specimens. These were preserved in herbariums where they were classified, ordered and renamed. The cultivation of these plants played a key role in the expansion of European empires. Local knowledge and labour were exploited, and indigenous cultures erased. Plants and human bodies were moved around the world, creating monocultures fuelled by slavery, which devastated ecosystems and uprooted populations. These issues are ongoing and continue to endanger fragile and vital alliances between people and the living world. 

‘Traditional Ecological Knowledges’, meanwhile, refer to a deep understanding of local environments, usually held by indigenous communities. These are evolving bodies of knowledge, practice and belief, often founded on reciprocity and respect for the relationships between living things. 

Patricia Domínguez

Patricia Domínguez’s work brings together experimental research on ethnobotany (the study of how people from particular areas or cultures use indigenous plants), healing practices and the commercialisation of wellbeing. This newly commissioned installation uses the South American and European collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Wellcome Collection to explore narratives of colonial and neocolonial violence and honour indigenous knowledge on healing and nurturing the living world.  

The work focuses on a selection of specimens: Brugmansia, Banisteriopsis caapi (used for the visionary yagé or ayahuasca), cinchona and mandrake. Material related to each plant is displayed within futuristic totems, with the central one honouring pre-Columbian symbolic, spiritual knowledge and vision.

This installation is accompanied by a comprehensive printed guide. Please take one to find out more.  

Joseca

Joseca is a Yanomami artist living in the Brazilian Amazon. His detailed drawings combine images of shamanic plant spirits, summoned to restore health and fight off disease, with scenes from daily life in the forest. They illustrate the significance of trees as central to the ecosystem that supports human and non-human life.  

Trees are considered critical for ensuring a healthy supply of water through their symbiotic relationship with rain. This is symbolised in Maa hi, the great rain tree.  

The Yanomami are a group of communities of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists whose land sits on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. As inhabitants of the forest-land (Urihi thëri pë) they have a deep knowledge of the forest as an entity endowed with sensitivity. Its trees feel pain when their trunks are attacked with axes or by fire. The Yanomami shamans can hear their laments when they dry up or fall down, mortally wounded. 

Adapted from ‘The Rain Tree’ by anthropologist Bruce Albert. 

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris, France) has given a platform to the Yanomami community by exhibiting the works of several artists including Joseca. Fondation Cartier always works with Bruce Albert, the Hutukara Associação Yanomami in Brazil and its leader Davi Kopenawa.  

The Yanomami Indigenous Territory was legally registered by presidential decree in 1992. Since then, however, it has been invaded by more than 20,000 miners who have brought environmental destruction and, more recently, Covid-19 to the communities. The Yanomami lead a constant struggle to defend their lives, rights and to protect their forest. 

Davi Kopenawa is a shaman and spokesperson for the Yanomami. This film portrait documents his campaign to widen understanding of the urgent challenges facing communities living in the Amazon.  

Wildness

Humans often seek to control wildness in pursuit of ‘civilisation’. This desire reinforces an artificial separation between nature and culture and has resulted in acts of racist and environmental violence against human and non-human lives. 

The concept of wildness challenges the notion of the human being as an independent entity, separate and distinct from the rest of the living world. It invites us to relinquish control, to ‘rewild’ the land, our cities and our minds, allowing biodiversity to recover and ecosystems to restore themselves, both inside and outside our bodies.  

Can wildness allow us to redefine our relationship to the living world from within? Could the longevity and resilience of the vegetal world inspire us to take time to be more rooted, adaptable and attentive to our environment?  

Eduardo Navarro

Eduardo Navarro describes his work as emotional technology, a tool that allows us to develop trust, empathy and contemplation with non-human entities. He invites us to soothe our rational mind, become more embodied and reconnect to our somatic awareness.  

A meditative set of instructions, written with philosopher Michael Marder, and a site-specific performance under a local great plane tree encourage us to commune with – and learn from – plants. Navarro’s series of expansive and contemplative drawings depict part-human, part-plant beings. The work is made with charcoal on handmade, biodegradable envelopes, which contain London plane tree seeds. At the end of the exhibition, the envelopes will be placed in an open landscape, returning them to the soil. As the “biodegradable wombs” decompose, the seeds inside them will be activated. 

 Please use these performative instructions to explore the exhibition as a plant might. 

To listen in gallery, use headphones on bench 
Read by Monica Gagliano 
Duration: 7 mins 29 secs 

Watch the BSL video for 'Vegetal Transmutation' or read the transcription
Interpretation by Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq 
Duration: 10 mins 34 secs 

The Phasmatodea, or Spectra, are an order of insects that resemble plants. Commonly known as stick insects, they are also referred to as ghost insects. The fabric of this insect suit is made to mirror the bark of the London plane tree (Platanus x acerifolia), breaking down the boundaries between human phantom, insect and plant. Several of these skins will be activated in a performance under the Great Plane, a 200-year-old plane tree in Brunswick Square, local to Wellcome Collection. 

Ingela Ihrman

‘A Great Seaweed Day’ is part of a wider project called ‘The Inner Ocean’, inspired by Ingela Ihrman’s love of swimming in the sea. ‘The Inner Ocean’ refers to the fluid that surrounds egg cells in all land-living mammals. This liquid has the same salinity as the primal ocean once had, where life first emerged. Ihrman’s seaweed sculptures suggest a deep connection between ocean ecosystems and our bodies. She describes the use of green algae gut weed (Ulva intestinalis) in her work as “a link between gut flora and marine flora: a slippery channel for returning to the water…” 

The title of the series is inspired by a diary entry written by Margaret Gatty (1809−73), an English writer and field biologist who studied seashore lifeforms. In 1848, Gatty spent time on the coast in Hastings, to recover from illness following the birth of her seventh child. She was introduced to beachcombing by her doctor and went on to amass an enormous collection of seaweed specimens, now held at St Andrews Botanic Garden, Scotland.  

A specimen of Nitophyllum gattyanum from the Margaret Gatty Herbarium. Collected in 1870 in Tasmania by an unknown collector.  
Reproduced with permission from the St Andrews Botanic Garden Trust.  

A specimen of Alaria esculenta from the Margaret Gatty Herbarium. Collected in Oban by William Henry Harvey.  
Reproduced with permission from the St Andrews Botanic Garden Trust.  

Sop

In March 2020 Sop was instructed to shield, as someone considered “clinically extremely vulnerable” to serious disease if they caught Covid-19. In ‘The Den’, a three-part meditative soundwork, they document the process of constructing a secret den and its role in their life as the pandemic unfolds. ‘The Den’ asserts the importance of urban nature and reclaims the “uncultivated, unattractive spaces in-between” as Sop describes them, which represent time and space as experienced by the chronically ill.  

In the third and final part of the work, restrictions have eased, and for many, life has gone back to normal. For Sop, however, their relationship with the woods continues to chime with their experience of illness. The den accepts them and their fluctuating capacity without judgement, and they find solace in the longevity of nature set against our relatively fleeting human lives.  

To listen, use headphones on bench 

To watch BSL, scan your phone 

This “portable den” provides Sop with access to the protective power of nature and the symbolic shelter of the den when the artist is unable to travel to the woods. Each leaf is covered in a drawn motif, which Sop describes as equipping them with a transformative power. The process of collecting and pressing leaves, drawing on them and assembling the portable den documents the passing of time. This “slow making” flexes to Sop’s fluctuating capacity. 

As time passes the den is no longer only used by Sop, but by others, including the bees that are burrowed in the ground within the den, and a robin that visits. The dancer in this newly commissioned film represents a body in relation to the structure of the den, which is a silent witness to the performance. The title comes from an Old English folk saying to charm against the actions of fairies. 

RESOLVE Collective

RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. ‘What The Wild Things Are’ is an artist-led research collaboration between RESOLVE, Wellcome Collection, West Dean College in West Sussex and De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. The project surveys the geographical and political ecological settings of each institution – the urban, the rural and the coastal. It forages in local and institutional spaces, finding and incorporating community engagement, archival research and experiments with materials, to challenge our separation of built and ‘natural’ environments.  

Here, RESOLVE presents ‘We Wunt Be Druv / Tings Nuh Run We’, which excavates wilderness in the city. At its core is an engagement programme that works with young people from Coram’s Field Youth Centre to propagate ideas of what it means to ‘re-wild’ their built environments, in response to their local experiences. 

Excavated from the project’s various sites, ‘We Wunt Be Druv / Tings Nuh Run We’ brings together the vegetal world and the wreckage of our built environments. 

The foraged material has been shaped and selected by an engagement programme that encourages young people to challenge definitions of what is ‘wild’ in their local environments. Through a series of activities, from mudlarking to knapping, archaeological walks to horticultural workshops, young people from Coram’s Fields Youth Centre will interrogate their local areas to re-evaluate their position within ‘nature’. They also chose objects from their lives that offer a sense of wildness, some of which are shown here.  

The gabion landscape collapses the distinction between ‘human’ and ‘nature’, ‘design’ and ‘creation’, and invites visitors to interrogate these contradictions by sitting, standing, and interacting with this garden of “anthropic wilderness”. 

Credits

Curator: Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz 
Senior Curator: Emily Sargent 
Exhibition Project Manager: Amy Higgitt 
Creative Producer: Bryony Harris 
Project Assistant: Dominic Neergheen 
Registrars: David Chan, Rowan De Saulles 
Gallery Manager: Christian Kingham 
Audiovisual: Jeremy Bryans 
Exhibition Technician: Lucy Woodhouse 
Conservator: Kath Knowles 
3D Design: Andreas Lechthaler Architecture 
2D Design: Melanie Mues Design 
Lighting Design: Satu Streatfield with Jack Wates 
Construction: MER 
Graphic Production: Displayways 

This exhibition is a collaboration between Wellcome Collection and La Casa Encendida (Madrid)

We would like to thank all the artists, lenders, contributors and colleagues who have generously lent their works, expertise and ideas to the exhibition, and who have contributed to its planning and delivery.  

Special thanks to: Sarah Auld, Monica Gagliano, Cinthya Lana, Michael Marder, Angelica Muñoz, J C Niala, Cristina Nieto, David Roberts, Merlin Sheldrake, Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq and Kim Walker.