FEMM HORTUS

What do speculative plant futures look like? Under what conditions do reproductive justice and herbal plant guides function and inform our understanding of the world 100 years from now? FEMM HORTUS is a digital sculpture and collaborative platform documenting herbariums in the year 2121. Plants have been personified throughout human history. Human relationships and connections to the natural world have been mediated through visual interpretations and definitions, limited, and directed by our conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and nationality. Plants are objects of knowledge – not active participants. In the year 2121, use and personification merge and evolve into a trans-digital language. FEMM HORTUS observes plant communication and intelligence, a vegetal modernity. Through projected animation and living plants, this herbarium is an interactive and expansive guide of the biennial herb Wild Carrot (Daucus carota). [1] The herbarium encompasses historical medicinal use, abortifacient and contraceptive use, wild cultivation, plant migration, and speculative communication. 

[1] Daucus carota L. can be found growing wild in fields and highway medians throughout Europe, southwest Asia, Australia, and North America. Common names include Wild Carrot, Queen Anne’s Lace and Gajar. Earliest written reference appears in Hippocrates in the fifth or fourth century B.C.E. and has been used medicinally for preventing bladder stones, treating gas, high blood pressure, and as a contraceptive and abortifacient. Native to present-day Afghanistan, Daucus spread to China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, reaching Europe in the fifteenth century, and was later introduced to North America by European colonizers. The seeds contain a volatile oil, which prevents embryonic implantation and has been used effectively as a daily birth control supplement.