Radical Botany Curated by Anya Ventura LACE Screening Room Saturday, August 3, 2024, 2–5 PM Philosophical Research Society 3910 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027 Limited free parking available on site LACE Screening Room presents "Radical Botany," curated by Anya Ventura. This film program engages with the idea of radical botany, defined by scholars Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari as when “plants are not just objects of manipulation but participants in the effort to imagine new worlds and to envision new futures.” How do plants on film model intelligence and alterity, and offer new possibilities to imagine posthuman futures? The works in this program depict plants in laboratories, greenhouses, and field surveys subject to scientific, colonial, and capitalist modes of production while challenging how plants are represented, controlled, and reduced to mere specimens. Through experiments in language and visual perception that disrupt Western epistemologies, these artists attempt to give form to what might be called a plant consciousness. Plants are shown as active agents, vibrant vegetal life-forms that interact with humans in surprising, erotic, therapeutic, and horrific ways. How might the moving image exploring other-than-human ontologies, give rise to new ways of seeing and being-with plants? How might plants see back? Questioning habits of scientific scrutiny or pastoral romanticization, these works embrace the radical otherness of plants to reveal experimental ways of being in a time of ecological crisis. Radical Botany features films by A.K. Burns, Karel Doing, Emily Drummer, Sky Hopinka, Jodie Mack, and Nancy Valladares. The program is followed by a discussion, moderated by Anya Ventura, with Antonia Szabari and Natania Meeker, authors of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction; botanist Peri Lee Pipkin, and artist Star Feliz. The event will also feature a Bouquet Bar prepared by Emily Alford from Muddy Heaven. About the Curator Anya Ventura is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Frieze, Art in America, and The Bafflwe, among others. She holds an MA in the Public Humanities from Brown University and an MFA in writing from the University of Iowa, where she was an Arts Fellow. Having previously held positions at MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology and Harvard’s Chinese Art Media Lab, she now works at the Getty Research Institute. She currently co-runs an experimental lecture series called Place Settings that occurs in unconventional locations around Los Angeles. About the LACE Screening Room The LACE Screening Room is a moving image series organized by LACE and curated by guest curators at Philosophical Research Society while LACE’s home on Hollywood Boulevard is under renovation. Click here for more information on LACE’s gallery. Support for the LACE Screening Room is provided by the Pasadena Art Alliance.