Plant Lives - Ruth Sacks on Behind Johannesburg: Plants and Possible Futures
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Ruth Sacks will speak on
Behind Johannesburg: Plants and Possible Futures
Click here for paper
This seminar, which is centred on a chapter from the book Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care, explores two ubiquitous edible plants of the city of Johannesburg and its hinterland (the most industrialized in Africa). How maize (a staple crop) and blackjack (an invasive species) are cultivated, from wholescale maize production to the informal farming initiatives in the inner city, point to toxic apartheid and colonial legacies of inequality that attach specific stigmas to different categories of plants and ways of growing. Thinking with the idea of hinterland, and its ancient role of providing food for the city, maize and blackjack provide a way into considering possible plant food futures in the face of ecological devastation aided and abetted by large-scale industry.
Ruth Sacks (https://ruthsacks.net/) is a South African academic and visual artist, whose creative practice is based in sculptural installations that link together artist books, objects, and writing. She is interested in postcolonial ecologies of the African city in the time of climate crisis, particularly plants and architectural remains. Sacks published her first academic monograph, Congo Style: From Belgian Art Nouveau to African Independence (Michigan University Press) in 2023. She is an Associate Professor in the Visual Art Department of the University of Johannesburg who obtained her PhD from the Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research in 2017. As an artist, Sacks has exhibited widely, including at CIVA Museums & Archive (Brussels, 2023), ZKM | Centre for Art & Media (Karlsruhe, 2011), Performa 09 (New York, 2009) and the Venice Biennale (2007). She was one of the co-directors of the large-scale group project Response-ability at the Joubert Park Greenhouse Project
(2020-1).
Monday, 17th March 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
Click here to register
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