Positioned at the heart of the urban fabric, Caron\u2019s murals mark sites of interconnectedness among peoples, geographies, and resources, or the lack of thereof. By nature, cities are sites of unstable and unjust topographies endlessly disrupted by all kinds of powers and forces. Urban evolutions, with their displacements and erasures, are intrinsically defined by the opposition of capitalist and social forces\u200a\u2014\u200athe centre and the periphery, financial districts and forsaken neighbourhoods. Fertile ground is rare, but weeds thrive on very little. They are emblems of tenacity and catalysts of hope, monuments of strength and markers of diversity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes, weeds in contemporary art are rooted in the past. Their stems emerge from present-time interactions with local people and specific places. Their blooms remind us that the power of dissidence is a natural element that ecosystems need in order to thrive. Over the past ten years, weeds have become a distinct genre as artists harness the disruptive power embodied by weed-being across a broad range of media. Weeds are symbolically charged like no other category of plants. Art magnifies and politicizes the very definition of \u201cweed,\u201d leading to important and nuanced discourses that encompass biology, ecology, geography, and politics. The oft-quoted statement, \u201cA weed is a plant out of place,\u201d from The Killer Inside Me<\/em>, a 1952 novel by Jim Thompson, now seems a simplistic and somewhat reductive definition of the bio-political and eco-cultural registers that weeds can encompass and evidence through artistic expression.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Unwanted plants form a fecund polysemic category. Their agential power is enhanced by our cultural dependency on hierarchy and order: an inherent reliance on binary structures that still defines our thinking today. Weeds are not just plants out of place, which bespeaks an outdated sense of passivity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n More accurately, contemporary artists show us that weeds actively weaken the foundations of order and perceived conceptions of purity; they thrive in the shadow of power.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n For most weeds there isn\u2019t a proper place to exist and their total eradication is what most people desire. Some species are indigenous, while others have been imported and cultivated. Many were unintentionally displaced. A vast number were brought to a place that initially seemed right but quickly turned wrong. Right\/wrong\u200a\u2014\u200athis false dichotomy no longer adequately contains the complex issues raised by weeds in art, intricacies that, species by species and artist by artist, only become more and more entangled. It is in this context that contemporary artists keep returning to the places where weeds grow in search of naturalized manifestations of resilience capable of foregrounding diversity, alterity, and historical roots while challenging our pre-established notions of what is considered normal by a capitalist-grounded majority. In the eyes of contemporary artists, what does it mean to resist like a weed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chicago-based photographer Jin Lee has assembled a photographic herbarium cataloguing weeds that grow in back alleys. These are the nonhuman urban dwellers that thrive on rainwater alone while occasionally getting pissed on by dogs. Gently referencing Albrecht D\u00fcrer\u2019s famous watercolour Great Piece of Turf<\/em> (1503), the plants in Lee\u2019s Weed<\/em> series (2012\u200a\u2013<\/em>ongoing) aren\u2019t necessarily out of place\u200a\u2014\u200aChicago alleys are full of weeds that people more or less tolerate and urban pollinators adore. But it is how the plants relate to the broader urban context\u200a\u2014\u200athe history and topography of the city\u200a\u2014\u200athat charges their political potential. The ones that Lee photographed with such care are \u201cproletarian weeds\u201d: they bear no cultural importance and are invisible, always multiple, and disposable. In the context of the local phyto-ranking, these plants are the antithesis of the lush cultivars that grace the Magnificent Mile in the heart of town, where alleys are rare and unaffordable luxury apartments are the norm. Dispossessed in a city known for its policies of racial and social segregation, Lee\u2019s weeds resist adversity and resourcefully adapt\u200a\u2014\u200athey survive, determined. Some are native to the Chicago region, whereas others have come from afar. They thrive together, side by side. The angle, the light, the focus\u200a\u2014\u200aLee\u2019s lens evidences their dignity; they have earned every bit of their being for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a concept, weeds emerge from a settler colonial logics of ordering, with its related taxonomies and ontologies that reinforce boundaries between inside and outside, centre and periphery. They grow against anthropocentric relativist constructs grounded in fierce exclusionism. There are certain kinds of social and cultural normativity that weeds irreparably perturb simply with their presence. Once again, the upset they cause is not generated by the presumed rightness or wrongness of their placement. It\u2019s most likely their determined unpredictability\u200a\u2014\u200atheir unwillingness to stay put, conform, and comply\u200a\u2014\u200athat troubles the system. There\u2019s a powerful uncontainability to weeds that is profoundly unsettling. They often instil fear of contamination and corruption; once they take hold, it\u2019s impossible to get rid of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These notions are explored by Canadian artist Zachari Logan through his meticulously crafted pastels on paper. A recurring motif in his work is the ditch\u200a\u2014\u200aa weed-infested, liminal space\u200a\u2014\u200aan unglamorous periphery of institutionally neglected land, a gutter with no purpose other than to serve as a drain or dump. The ditch, often undisturbed, is where weeds can thrive and reclaim territory, away from the centre, far from sight. In Logan\u2019s work, the ditch is neither a right nor a wrong place but \u201cthe site of the unwanted,\u201d the marginalized, the overlooked cultural fringe to which the LGBTQIA2S+ community has been historically relegated. But Logan\u2019s ditch is also a site of attraction and desire: a provider of nectar and pollen for insects and a sheltered site for gay encounters. There\u2019s sheer beauty of an unconventional kind in Logan\u2019s vision. Far from the tidy splendour of well-tended plants and the normalized banality of formal gardens, tendrils, leaves, petals, and stems foreground the essence and importance of diversity across culture as well as ecology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The power that weeds have to resist normativity also run deep in the work of Zheng Bo, who for years now has produced large-scale interventions aimed at rewilding institutional and commercial spaces. In 2013, for the West Bund Architecture and Contemporary Art Biennial, Zheng transformed a disused cement factory that had been reclaimed by the local flora into a found, temporary, botanical garden of weeds. Plants Living in Shanghai<\/em> (2013), which also involved the participation of local scholars and an online open-access course exploring the history of Shanghai through its plants, capitalized on the implicit invitation of weeds to follow them into rewilded futures. In Weed Party<\/em> (2015\u200a\u2013<\/em>\u200a Questions about national identity, history, and ecology, as well as diasporic experience and the racialization of nature, are further explored in the work of Nigerian-American artist Precious Okoyomon. Her installation To See the Earth Before the End of the World<\/em> (2022) filled the unforgettable last gallery of The Milk of Dreams<\/em>, the main exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale. In the space, kudzu (Pueraria montana<\/em>) and sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum<\/em>) were allowed to grow unchecked throughout the run of the event, eventually nearly smothering the monolithic figures made of soil and straw that dotted the space. Ancestral guardians? Pantheistic deities? Or future human-nonhuman incarnations? Their stern postures and enigmatic silence cast them as witnesses of a future renaissance in which humans are no longer the centre of all things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okoyomon\u2019s installation was overwhelmingly sensual, brimming with livingness\u200a\u2014\u200athe humidity, the fragrance of the earth\u200a\u2014\u200aand postcolonial in essence. Kudzu and sugar cane share different and yet indissolubly related histories of displacement, domestication, and ecological devastation. Kudzu was brought to the United States from its native Japan in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Many decades later, in the 1930s, the US government used it to mitigate the severe soil erosion caused by the inconsiderate, intensive cultivation of cotton on slave plantations across the American South. Both kudzu and sugar cane share histories in which ecology, economy, racialization, and exploitation are deeply rooted. The disastrous biological and cultural histories entangled in the roots of these two plants, both native to Asia, became indissolubly intertwined in American soil\u200a\u2014\u200aeach, in turn, at different times. Each is a weed or a desirable commodity, depending on the cultural milieu. The ecological damage caused by these plants and their mismanaged dissemination by humans across enormous swaths of land is directly connected to the history of slavery\u200a\u2014\u200aanother process of forced, en masse relocation of lives that were, and still are, deemed unworthy and undesirable by many.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Okoyomon\u2019s vision of the future is one that cannot forget the past, one in which the definition of invasive plant species is problematized to the point that it entirely loses its meaning. The racialization of the natural world, the narratives of social resistance and freedom, the embodiment of reparative practices, and the invitation to care\u200a\u2014\u200aweeds, as monuments of resilience\u200a\u2014\u200aare constantly quivering, agitated by relentless winds of change. They invite us to craft new registers of resistance modelled on ecological practices of tenacity and dissidence grounded in a past of injustice that still haunts the present. Weeds in contemporary art monumentalize the raw and relentless beauty of resilience. Whether biological entities grounded in living ecosystems or well-crafted metaphors, or both at once, these weeds complicate our conceptions of self, harnessing anthropomorphic strategies that invite us to think about our actions and political orientations but never reducing plants to hollow vessels of narcissistic symbolism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The work of contemporary artists shows that the unsettling agency of weeds today mostly lies in their independence and autonomy, which is the biggest threat they can pose to the system. They survive and thrive despite the deliberate neglect by institutions and governments and law enforcement\u2019s unwarranted repression. They emerge, over and over, and therefore never go extinct. What they represent is indelible, forever self-perpetuating, defiantly blooming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n An author and curator specializing in the history and theory of photography, representations of nature, and materiality in art, Giovanni Aloi has edited and authored more than ten books. He is the editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture<\/em> and the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n![\"Jin-Lee-Weed3\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/108_DO_Aloi_Jin-Lee_Weed3.jpg\")
Weed 3<\/em>, 2012, from the series Weed<\/em>,
2012-ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist &
Devening Projects, Chicago<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Jin-Lee-Weed1\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/108_DO_Aloi_Jin-Lee_Weed1.jpg\")
Weed 3<\/em>, 2012, from the series Weed<\/em>, 2012-ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Devening Projects, Chicago<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Zachari-Logan-Eunuch-Tapestry-No3\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/108_DO_Aloi_Zachari-Logan_EunuchTapestryNo3.jpg\")
Zachari Logan<\/strong>
Eunuch Tapestry No. 3<\/em>, 2013.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
ongoing), Zheng further explored his inquiry into the agency of unwanted plants as both literal and metaphorical disrupters akin to political movements that spread cultures of resistance against totalitarian powers. The creation of a temporary garden filled with horseweed (Erigeron canadensis<\/em>), an invasive species native to North America and now common throughout eastern China, raised important questions about our perceptions of plants in relation their origins. What is at stake in the proliferation of this weed? National identity? The past of a nation? The future of ecosystems? Which parameter most strongly influences one\u2019s response to the weed\u2019s persistence? Which should we prioritize in our decision making and why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Zheng-Bo-Plants-Living-in-Shanghai\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/108_DO_Aloi_Zheng-Bo_PlantsLivinginShanghai_2013_01.jpg\")
Zheng Bo<\/strong>
Plants Living in Shanghai<\/em>, 2013.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Precious-Okoyomon-To-See-the-Earth-Before-the-End-of-the-World\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/108_DO_Aloi_Precious-Okoyomon_03.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Precious-Okoyomon-To-See-the-Earth-Before-the-End-of-the-World,\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/108_DO_Aloi_Precious-Okoyomon_01.jpg\")
To See the Earth Before the End of the World<\/em>, installation views, Venice Biennal, 2022. \u00a9 Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia \u2013 ASAC
Photos: Ela Bialkowska \u2212<\/em><\/strong> OKNOstudio<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Zachari-Logan-Datura-(from-Eunuch-Tapestry-Series)\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/108_DO_Aloi_Zachari-Logan_DaturafromEunuchTapestrySeries.jpg\")
Zachari Logan<\/strong>
Datura<\/em>, from the series Eunuch Tapestries<\/em>, 2013.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n