phytoturgies is a project by nonhumanities (Katie Schetlick, Anna Hogg, and Conrad Cheung) that combines installation, performance, and video to activate and reimagine public relationships to the plant life of Morven Sustainability Lab, a vast landscape of unceded Monacan land developed into a slave plantation at the turn of the 19th century. Recycling the materials of nonhumanities’ past project series point to touch…, phytoturgies focuses attentional and performative tools on the overlooked and unspectacular but ecologically essential plant life that constitute the majority of Morven’s landscape.

Accompanied by a video that acts as invitation into phytophilic logics and as partial score, the project’s performances bring the public from the institutional core of Morven’s main house and formal gardens to its disused former entryway, spaces that trace both colonial logics of arrival and contemporary efforts at sustainability. Slow, multisensory engagements unfold along the route: guided walks, propagation practices, and embodied acts that ask participants to linger, dwell, hold, touch, and gather. Each performance ends with the collective planting of seeds foraged from Morven's former entryway during the performance’s return from margin to center. Brought to Morven's greenhouse to be tended over the coming months, these seeds grow in soil amended with mycorrhizae, bark from a dead ash branch carried from margin to center, and biomass, including hair and skin, contributed by participants. Refusing neoliberal framings of sustainability and methods of extractive identification, phytoturgies embraces propinquity as a precondition for interspecies understanding — being in the space of, and so becoming with, another.

​

This website grows as both a durational archive and a standing invitation: it documents the project's installations as they co-develop over the course of a year with their surrounding flora, fauna, and funga, and it houses the project's open-source score, to be adapted in other practices of vegetal propinquity elsewhere in the world.