The Routledge Companion to Design Research

The work involved in designing and circulating the two projects came about as multispecies, multi-sited and multi-disciplinary practices. While “following” hyperaccumulator plants (Gatto & McCardle, 2019), I was able to navigate in person the places associated with their existence, moving between different sites, places and locus of knowledge production. The heart of my work, however, started right from field work done on (and about) the contaminated site. This allowed me to explore those plants’ interweaving of social relationships from within, trying to comprehend how these plants, often so small and even understood as weeds to eradicate, manage to prosper due to the settings of their land, configuring entirely new ecosystems. To get to the core of the discussion on multispecies networks and encounters, I suggest beginning by posing two questions. First, what sort of network does the project explore?

The two presented projects situate hyperaccumulating flora at the core of the design process; in particular, they are motivated by those plants’ capacity of metabolizing heavy metals. Yet, both projects attempt to interpret metabolism through more-than-biological lenses. If, on the one hand, we are used to think of metabolism as biochemical activities that permit life in living organisms (e.g. allowing the conversion of food into energy, proteins, lipids, and elimination of waste), the term can also be used as a metaphor and paradigm to account for socially enacted mechanisms. Social metabolism, for instance, refers to the biophysical transformation and distribution processes in human societies, “constituting the self-reproduction and evolution of their biophysical structures” (Pauliuk & Hertwich, 2015). Urban metabolism looks instead at the flows of material and energy in cities and urban settings.

One interesting aspects of metabolism is linked to its reading as a series of intra-species, performative processes. Monika Bakke introduced the concept of “Metabolic Network” (Bakke, 2017), as a way to discuss the links existing between plants and minerals. In doing so, her purpose is to provide a geological rather than biological reading of vegetal metabolism, which serves her as a lens to analyze vegetal agency from a relational stance transcending time and space.

Geomerce and Vegetal Rescuers show that a multispecies reading of metabolism allows considering hyperaccumulating plants as living probes for exploring blasted territories, helping us to identify what agentic forces are at play within those places. Furthermore, being the designer positioned in a dialectical space that gestures towards the future, it also allows to carry out research across the times and places that define a plant’s life, performing narrative bridges that can bring these times and places in relation to each other. In the instance of Geomerce, the original metabolic network of hyperaccumulators initially included minerals, former mines, plant scholars and other actors with which these plants interacted from their natural habitat. While inhabiting the research process, however, that network was extended to a constellation of different sites (e.g. the lab and the showroom), and cut across different temporal setting. The plants who uptake minerals from a polluted sites are the same plants that nourished the work of the labs involved in the design process; the very plants that were also brought into the exhibition venue, to process Geomerce’s solutions, suggesting its possible transformation into financial value.

The second question concerns the forms of agency exerted by the network’s participants, and how to experience them. During my lab and field work on occasion of Geomerce’s landing in Ljubliana, I observed that endemic hyperaccumulators are engaged in multiple relationships and forces. For instance, they do act politically, within metabolic networks involving post-industrial sites, national environmental policies, biologists and even laboratory things such as academic publications and lab equipment. Such mode of agency emerges relationally, as a result of the reciprocal affordances of these actors/actants. In growing on territories of political disputation (such as brownfields or former industrial sites), often subjected to the scrutiny of national environmental policies, each metallophyte species manage to engender responses from national research institutions, which then aggregate biologists and lab equipment to identify opportunities for the remediation of dirty land. The relationship between  those actors resulted in relational processes that transformed the territory: some of these sites were later cleaned up, although often without the employment of phytoremediation processes.

Hyperaccumulators also act as witnesses of their environmental disturbances, both historical and contemporary. My field encounters with these plants revealed the geo-historical dimension of their presence on particular sites, linking stories of contamination otherwise temporally distant. This was partly possible as a result of the transformative actions in which those plants are involved, that is, their capability of forging relations determining a transformation of the territory. To encounter that agentic dimension, I had to assemble objects and practices that helped me to make sense of it. Tsing’s notions of Assemblage and Bodily Forms (A. Tsing, 2013, p. 32) were used as ethnographic concepts to approach those species as participants in multispecies networks. The plants collected from the former mines were chosen while paying attention to their geographical position, bodily form, color and vitality, through a tacit mode of interaction that I attempted to establish with them, in quality of witnesses of past environmental events.

This way of reading participation in the metabolic network had important implications for me and for the project. Most importantly, it brought me in direct touch with unexpected, other-than-human perspectives concerning the future of some territories, alternative to those proposed by current techno-industrial models of environmental restoration. Understanding that plant metabolism is not only entangled with our social life but can also emerge as an unplanned consequence of it, does reposition us as human beings, and at the same time helps imagining scenarios of environmental collaboration and rehabilitation, as opposed to logics of accumulation and resources exploitation. Given the current ecological crisis, now more than ever we need to familiarize with these viewpoints, as not only they can they help us overcome the fatigue and distress of “living in the ruins” (A. Tsing, 2005), but can also provide us a means to re-negotiate our existence in a broken nature, paving the way to an inversion of thought towards the environment.

I would like to thank: Stimuleringsfunds Creative Industries; Giovanni Innella; the Plant Sciences and Environmental Sciences group of the University of Wageningen. This book chapter partially builds on work previously presented at conference: The Ecological Turn, January 2021. Another version was presented at conference: Safe Harbors, October 2021.