Plants are Future/Art is Power

Solastalgia’s Flora was the visual metaphor for a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies’s special issue ‘Life Writing in the Anthropocene’.

“Laurent’s immersive installation transforms the conventions of portraiture and the silhouette to narrate the extinction of plant life,  capturing a key feature of the Anthropocene: it is, ‘first and foremost, about death on an unimaginable scale’ … The force of Laurent’s portraits [suggest] the importance of artistic practice, as well as scholarly theory, in expanding thinking on life matters and life writing.”

“The magnitude of these events is extraordinary. Given the scale of ecological devastation and collapse, new modes of storytelling are required to convey our interconnection with, and responsibility to, things other than humans. Laurent’s installation and its turn to portraiture ... to represent plant life (and extinction) captures this botanical turn, as well as the definitive force of thinking in terms of the age of the Anthropocene—the 'extravagant wastage of lives and of earth'.”

Here is a pdf of the issue’s introduction, by Jessica White & Gillian Whitlock, about life & death in the Anthropocene, and an imperative to portray plants in our narratives. The entire issue is written with superlative insight & perspective, and I’m honoured that my installation is included as an example.

Anna Laurent