INVITE | Plant Lives - Stephané Conradie on Transferred matter | 14 April | 4pm
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Stephané Conradie will speak on
Transferred matter: Reflections on articulage in ecoprinting practices
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Ecoprinting is a process that involves extracting plant matter’s tannins and pigments through steam, pressure and mordants. During these processes, plant matter is transferred onto a paper or fabric substrate. In this seminar, I discuss how this printing process is used in my artistic practice in conjunction with the notion of ‘articulage’, coined by Masa Lemu. Articulage draws on Stuart Hall’s writing on articulation and the tinkering practice of bricolage. Ecoprinting and articulage are praxis-driven methodologies which I use to create assemblages from plant materials and objects, which have been divested through death, displacement or migration. Like collecting divested objects, I collect plants for their latent pigment potential. Their pigments are revealed through alchemic processes that transform how their matter was previously perceived. I apply articulage then to reflect on how these storied objects (organic and inorganic) combine to form and reveal new material possibilities through ‘pressure cooker’ environments.
Stephané Conradie is a senior lecturer in printmedia at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa. While primarily trained as a printmaker, her artistic practice is invested in bricolage assemblages focusing on object ontologies. Her research and practice stem from a fascination with how people arrange sentimental objects in their homes, particularly in her family members’ homes in Namibia and South Africa. Conradie’s work examines the histories of colonialism and creolisation embedded in domestic material culture, calling into question how identity is encoded in the private domain. These objects have provided her with a language to investigate the creolised formations of identity that are linked to South Africa’s histories of colonialism, slavery, segregation, and apartheid. Creolisation directs our attention towards the cultural phenomena and material culture resulting from displacement and the ongoing dynamic interchange of symbols and practices, eventually leading to new forms with varying degrees of stability. Conradie holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Stellenbosch, where she completed her MA in Visual Arts (Art Education). In 2022, she received the inaugural Young Artist Award for participating in the Triennale Kleinplasik, followed by the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (Visual Arts category) and the Emerging Researcher Award from UCT in 2023.
Monday, 14th April 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
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Plant Lives is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
It follows two previously successful series, Heated Conversations and Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
In these calamitous times, are plants a distraction from pressing problems, or a new way to approach them? Is the burgeoning field of the plant humanities just another fad with little bearing on the global South? Can we imagine a seedy and weedy politics in which plants are less metaphors for human logics and more themselves? Can we shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives? And if so, with what consequences?
This seminar series explores the global plant humanities and the conversations that plant worlds enable. We envisage a postcolonial plantarium* which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Our starting point is 'ruderal', a term which describes a plant that grows in disturbed grounds. A plant humanities for the global South takes shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.
*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term