The Museum of Plant Art explores artistic self-expression of plants.
Rooted in scientific, artistic, and philosophical inquiries into non-anthropocentric thought—which recognises intelligence, interiority, and forms of consciousness in plants—the Museum of Plant Art interrogates vegetal gestures to reconsider aptitudes traditionally ascribed solely to humans, such as talent and artistic intention. In doing so, it critically re-examines established taxonomies of the arts and the institutional frameworks that define artistic authorship within academia and museums.
While human artistic production is often celebrated for its ability to transcend rational cognition—particularly when created in altered states of consciousness that evoke affective and sensory responses—there remains a profound psychological resistance to acknowledging a parallel capacity for self-expression in plants. Whether rooted in fear, ego, ignorance, obstinacy, or an unwillingness to challenge institutional definitions of art, this reluctance reflects a broader disregard for the agency of the non-human, a perspective that threatens the very conditions of our shared future. The Museum of Plant Art seeks to dismantle such anthropocentric assumptions, offering instead an expanded understanding of the arts through a vegetal lens.
Positioned in direct opposition to the extractivist logic of Western, patriarchal, and colonial capitalism, non-anthropocentric perspectives advocate for a pluriversal, collaborative coexistence with other species. Here, plants are not mere resources to be exploited but cohabitants to be acknowledged, engaged with, and understood on their own terms. This approach prompts a deeper reflection on the mechanisms of differentiation and exclusion that have historically shaped human relationships with the more-than-human world, revealing the political and economic structures that underpin these divisions.
At the core of the Museum of Plant Art’s inquiry lies a commitment to socio-ecological concerns. Its exhibitions and publications do not seek to aestheticise nature but rather to position plants as creators of aesthetic experiences and as artists in their own right. In doing so, the museum does not merely document plant life but actively participates in a radical reimagining of artistic agency, challenging the epistemic boundaries that continue to define what—and who—is permitted to create.
A museum with a vegetal structure.
The Museum of Plant Art assumes a vegetal structure—one that develops, grows, metamorphoses, and decays in response to its context. This mutability ensures that the museum does not adhere to a fixed, vertical architecture but instead embodies an interdependent and fluid framework, rejecting permanence in favour of adaptability.
Existing solely through collaborative partnerships with host institutions, the museum embraces a dynamic and sustainable model, one that resists the extractive demands of physical construction and excessive resource consumption. Rather than imposing itself as an autonomous entity, it embeds its exhibitions and programmes within existing infrastructures, expanding artistic and socioecological discourse while minimising environmental impact. At the core of its ethos is the principle of shared infrastructure—not merely in terms of space, but through the reciprocal exchange of research, resources, practices, knowledge, and lived experiences.
This mutability extends to the museum’s engagement with local communities, enabling a more responsive and inclusive approach to public programming. By adapting to different contexts, the Museum of Plant Art fosters initiatives that are developed in direct collaboration with host institutions, ensuring that access to its activities—whether conferences, publications, workshops, or participatory projects—is reflective of the multiplicity of languages, cultures, and epistemologies that should inform its non-anthropocentric agenda.
Social dialogue, exchange, and co-design actively shape the museum’s trajectory. Its interdependencies with host institutions resist the imposition of a singular curatorial voice, instead embracing a decolonial strategy that foregrounds plurality. In this way, the museum functions not as an isolated entity but as a node within a broader network, symbiotically engaging with existing artistic communities and practices. Collaboration and interchange are not supplementary to its structure but rather intrinsic to its very existence.
The museum’s vegetal, horizontal architecture precludes traditional hierarchies—it does not adhere to a system of organs, departments, or bureaucratic structures but instead symbioses with the specific art communities it encounters. Much like plants, which both transform and are transformed by their surroundings, the museum shapes and is shaped by the contexts it inhabits, forming affective, cooperative ecologies in parallel with its host institutions. Just as plants, pollinators, fungi, and algae co-evolve to support one another’s existence, so too does the Museum of Plant Art seek to honour these natural processes of entanglement, metamorphosis, and mutual flourishing.
On developing empathy for plants.
Since ancient Greece, the unperceivable movement of plants has been associated with a lack of inherent life in them*. Plants have historically been seen as passive and motionless, incapable of sensation or consciousness. We now know that plants are complex organisms with unique behaviours, communication systems, and responses to stimuli. Plants perceive their environment, make decisions, and adapt to changing conditions. Plants are capable of self-change, and they also move, not necessarily slowly, as we can see in BBC documentaries. **
The Museum of Plant Art was created to foster debate and reflection on our understanding of ourselves and other species and to mitigate the scarcity of institutions directly embracing nonanthropocentric perspectives in the arts. Alternative institutions give a platform to alternative narratives. If art museums celebrate human-made art, the Museum of Plant Art aims to nurture a political exploration of plants as makers of aesthetic experiences, as artists.
The Museum of Plant Art argues the reasons leading us to think that plants don’t make art fundamentally lie in our understanding of others, often discriminatory, as we frequently attribute certain capacities exclusively to ourselves until proven wrong. These capacities can be cognitive, like sentience or awareness, but also artistic like creativity and innovation.
While we deny capacities in plants, we certainly copy them. We copy technologies, designs and even architectural structures for our own buildings, products, and materials. This is often called biomimetics or biomimicry. In the case of architectural designs, it’s particularly paradoxical because the word archi (first/principal) teckton (artisan/craftsman) would place plants as “first creators”, which philosopher Michael Marder argues they are***.
The first exhibition of The Museum of Plant Art included a promising example of biomimicry developed by the University of Cambridge. These are plant-based celluloses containing nanocrystals that plants use to make their flowers interesting to pollinators and to control temperature. We humans hope to apply these celluloses to our budlings soon to counterbalance the warming of our cities due to the climate crisis.
The conceptualization of The Museum of Plant Art has benefited from conversations with philosophers, scientists, psychologists, art academics and others leading research on non-human living beings. I believe this is necessary to tackle gaps in the knowledge we have of other species, to bring forward conversations on art production, but also to facilitate discussion on our often-discriminatory perspective, the politics and economies benefiting from the marginalisation of other species, and the psychological reasons leading to it.
Experimental and non-anthropocentric approaches are being gradually adopted in scientific, artistic and philosophical debates. However, there is still resistance to embracing them. The development of The Museum of Plant Art was frequently met with skepticism and the counterargument that recognising artistic capacities in plants is a form of anthropomorphising them, that developing a more empathic perspective towards other species is nothing other than a “identificatory projection”, a form of human-centred narcissism.
In “Empathy for Plants”, philosopher Matthew Hall discusses this issue and proposes strategies to empathise with the non-human, rejecting the understanding of empathy as a projection process.****
Hall takes a perspective in which empathy is not limited to one’s “own isolated consciousness, trapped within the cartesian body and separate from other forms of consciousness” (2022, p.125) Hall’s text amalgamates a collection of philosophers defending a perspective where a community is implicit in every individual and through this embodied intersubjectivity we can understand an experience without having to establish an analogy or a projection.
Plants are alive, and their gestures convey inner states, says Hall. “Plant life histories and behaviours become then gestures and expression of life/mind” (2022, p.129). The recognition of these gestures makes human-plant empathy possible.
It is also worth mentioning that Western culture, profoundly marked by rationalism, cartesian division of the mind and body, and objectification in the service of functionality, might interfere with this process of empathising with earth co-habitants. Many non-Western living cultural traditions relate in a more empathic manner with non-human living beings, and in this sense, the museum aims to facilitate a greater reconnaissance and understanding of other forms of knowledge and philosophies.
The ensemble of experiences, texts, conversations and reflections offered by The Museum of Plant Art aims to facilitate debate and assists us to do the uncomfortable effort of rethinking our self-attributed “sapiens” label and to develop a comprehension of other beings as cohabitants within their right.
*Coren, D. (2019) ‘Aristotle on self-change in plants’, Rhizomata, 7(1), pp. 33–62. doi:10.1515/rhiz-2019-0002.
** These Seeds Can Walk! (2022). The Green Planet. BBC Earth
*** Marder, M. (2013) Plant-thinking a philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press.
**** Hall, M. (2022) ‘Empathy for plants’, Environmental Ethics, 44(2), pp. 121–136. doi:10.5840/enviroethics20225237.