Lecture
Giovanni Aloi – Plant Politics: Uncontainable Vegetal Agencies

Giovanni Aloi maps the ideological foundations that underpin human-plant relations in art to show how these have been shaped by colonialist, capitalist, and ecological forces. Working with plants in contemporary art entails surpassing the objectifying tropes that have defined past philosophical approaches to seriously and responsibly engage with cultural and ecological systems of interdependency. The artists featured in this lecture work with plants through a diverse range of media and operate in different geographical areas, but they all have in common the ability to foreground the uncontainable political agency of plants.

Giovanni Aloi's research focuses on critical reflection on the Anthropocene, the representation of nature in modern and contemporary art, climate change and sustainability. Another significant area of Aloi's interest is the history of the art market and how economic factors influence art making and writing about art. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. He has contributed to BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.

Lecture and discussion will be held in English.

Lecture will take place with the financial participation of the European Union's National Recovery Plan and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.