The recent emergence of the vegetal world in contemporary art is the symptom of a new cultural shift. No longer just interested in their aesthetic beauty, artists now look at plant agency and intelligence or focus on new considerations of plants as key players in historical, biological, and ecological contexts. As humanity begins to grapple with the urgency imposed by climate change, reconsidering human/plant relationships can reveal the importance of ecological interconnectedness and lead to a more nuanced consideration of the variety of living organisms and ecosystems with which we share the planet.
The contributions gathered in the second volume of Vegetal Entanglements-a tryptic entirely dedicated to plants in art and culture-focus on the notion of plant-encounters as an opportunity to overcome plant-blindness and see plants beyond the strictures of objectification. It is in this context that the artists, scholars, curators, and plant lovers featured on these pages stage and analyze original encounters with the vegetal world; they make visible, problematize, deconstruct and recontextualize to show how encounters with plants define our lives in multiple and often unpredictable ways.