Playing with Plants

Abstract

Contemporary performance and installation artist Vaughn Bell uproots urban plants from their expected places—the store, the garden, the greenhouse, the windowsill—and reimagines them in motion. Bell’s performance pieces feature plants “out of place,” plants on the move throughout busy urbanscapes, plants simultaneously rooted in soil and uprooted from fixed locations. Performing what this essay calls transplantment , Bell’s pieces quite literally traverse spatial demarcations of private/public, “nature”/culture, and plant/animal/human. In motion or prepared for movement, the plants perform material crossings throughout the city that inspire theoretical crossings as well. Through the transplantment of plants and place, Bell both critiques the taxonomic marginalization of plants and performs an alternate ecology in which plants and people are inter-embodied. Reimagining their socio-spatial relationship to each other, Bell signals an innovative engagement between urban plants and people—and with it a new form of interspecies performance.

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