Authors: Simon Torssell Lerin & Bettina Hvidevold Hystad
Text: Giovanni Aloi, Nadia Bensbih, Emanuele Coccia, Bettina Hvidevold Hystad & Simon Torssell Lerin, Suresh Jayaram, Mats Karström, Brandon LaBelle, Lars Lerin, Michael Marder, Timothy Morton, Elisabet Yanagisawa
Translation: Marinette Grimbeek, Erik van Ooijen
Publishing Editor: Johanna Widlund Crisman
Design: Åbäke
2025, English, Swedish, softcover
256 pages, 23 x 33 cm
ISBN: 9789198870527
This book documents Lerin/Hystad’s meetings with more than a hundred different plants through sketches, text, and music. The otherness of the non-human is by nature inexpugnable. The baseline of our sharing the planet with them, at this point in its evolutional history, entails making kin while negotiating distance. In line with the mounting environmental concerns, artists began to nurture the desire to present less mediated encounters with nature.
Central to Lerin/Hystad’s modus operandi is a principle of ecological interconnectedness that manifests the undeniable presence of more than human worlds. The main objective has been that of dismantling the anthropocentric view that humans are the most perfect and intelligent species on this planet while inviting us to reconsider non-human intelligences and complexities as valuable diversity. Lerin connects sensors to the plants that Hystad has carefully drawn in their environment. The sensors register electrical currents that plants produce through their biological rhythms and that form a communicational network with animals, bacteria, and fungi.