Smoke Trails (2021). Collaborative Survival explores the environmental narratives and ecological relationships that often get overlooked in mainstream consciousness. From dystopian sci-fi films to green technocapitalism, what often trickles down from scientific research on climate change into popular culture are dire visions of Earth’s future. The proposed scientific designation of our present geological epoch as the Anthropocene, in which humans are capable of driving the planet on a universal death track toward extinction, fuels these cultural narratives. However scientifically valid the concept of the Anthropocene may be, such an unfathomable, monolithic framework offers little room for the nuances of human and non-human relationships. While human activities are indisputably over-extracting from the earth, there are other stories to be told amid the ruins.

The artists in this exhibition mine the complex connections between humans and the lifeworlds of plants, revealing social, historical, political, personal, and material histories in the process. By joining feminist, decolonial, and indigenous scholars in taking to task the Western framework that positions “human” and “nature” as distinct and oppositional categories, these artists critique the erasure of other ways of living in the world that are inherently environmentally conscious or sustainable. In Collaborative Survival, plants and humans are bound together through specific, complex, and reciprocal relationships defined by interconnected processes of survival and displays of resilience that complicate the Anthropocene narrative.

601 Artspace, New York, as part of Collaborative Survival group exhibition curated by Danni Shen.