Participatory

The chapter chronicles and reflects on the processes and the meanings behind GeoMerce, a speculative design project that revolves around the notion of phytomining. The work examines the design of Geomerce’s network of professionals, ranging from biologists, technologists, financial advisors, and how that enabled an exchange of voices and expertise.

The paper explores the issue of participation in multispecies networks. It examines Geomerce and Vegetal Rescuers— design works that merge plant research with ethnographies on vegetal agency in contaminated landscapes. By tracking plants’ metabolic processes, it shows how weeds can co-create unexpected more-than-human worlds.

As part of BIO25, the research investigated the hyperaccumulator plant Thlaspi praecox, an endemic species that grows in Slovenja, within the Mežica Valley area. Activies involves laboratory work, on site field-work, and public engagement activities in the gallery, to explore the plant’ role in environmental and cultural remediation.

Geomerce’s landing at NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf explored the complex interactions between endemic ecotypes of Arabidopsis halleri and a contaminated site in North-Rhine-Westphalia, shedding light on how encounters between people and hyperaccumulating flora become formed through lab, field, and exhibit work.

GeoMerce draws a scenario in which agriculture blurs with finance and farming decisions are made according to both financial changes and scientific progress. By employing ISEs, the metal absorption process of hyperaccumulators is tracked and crossed with real-time data from the London Metal Exchange, resulting in multiple speculative visualizations and printed media.

Building on design activism and agricultural drone technologies, Vegetal Rescuers engages hyperaccumulators in processes of cultural and environmental healing. By growing on territories of political disputation, the work challenges human control and prompts to rethink our relationship with contaminated landscapes.

The paper introduces a transdisciplinary methodology based on the tactic of “following” plant collectives. Building on post-humanism theories, sustainability is addressed as the implementation of a design attitude that involves learning by cultivating relations of multispecies reciprocity.