SOLU Dialogues goes Frame: Follow the Plants
3 December 2024
Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Töölönkatu 11 A, Helsinki

In collaboration with Bioart Society, Frame hosts a dialogue between visiting curator Madeleine Collie and Bioart Society’s artistic director Yvonne Billimore, discussing their collaboration within the project Follow the Plants.   

A Food Art Research Network project, Follow the Plants expands from an experimental exchange initiated by Madeleine Collie, and developed in dialogue with Yvonne Billimore, that situates artists practices within and among the creative lives of plants.

During 2023 and 2024 the project supported eighteen artists across Americas, Australia, Asia, Europe and South Africa to correspond with another artist, exchanging their research and exploring plants as growing, decaying, metamorphosing beings that shape the places they inhabit. The projects exchanged rethink the environmental impact of settler societies, the forces of monopoly commerce, plantation logics and resource extraction on the lively socialites of plant-human communities. Follow the Plants is an exercise in carefully metabolising each other’s research, to learn how to think the world through another’s questions and to practise sharing custodianship of collective knowledge.

In the event Collie and Billimore discuss following and correspondence as curatorial methodologies, the challenges and wonders of collective research, and how following plants can teach us other ways of thinking and doing. Collie will be in residence at HIAP in early 2025 and would love to meet artists and researchers in Helsinki for whom following plants is a methodology of resistance to capitalist forms of enclosure.

SOLU Dialogues is an ongoing event series by Bioart Society where art, science and society meet. Through varying formats artists, scientists and other practitioners are invited to present and discuss their work.

Madeleine Collie is a curator, artist and writer living and working on unceded Boon Wurrung lands. For more than a decade she has worked with artists, activists, scientists, and institutions to consider ecological narratives through the lens of performance, social practice and research encounters. She established the Food Art Research Network (FAR) in 2020 through which artists share long term research practices beyond local contexts. Madeleine  is currently working on a longer term enquiry connected to food: Den Goda Maten with the Kin Museum, Kiruna on Sapmi in the Arctic Circle in collaboration with Maria Lind. FAR have created artwork, conversations, texts, recipes, and presented public programmes; including Making Effervescent Encounters, State of Concept, Athens, Los Rastros Que Dejamos, Cocina Colaboratorio, Mexico City, Edible Stories, Edible Worlds, Edible Archives, Goa, 2023,  Unexpected Landscapes in Pandemic Times, European Pavilion, Rome, 2022, Disorganising Metabolisms and The Sound of Justice Is Music To My Mouth, with Liquid Architecture, Melbourne 2021.

Yvonne Billimore’s interdisciplinary practice facilitates situations for collective learning, exchange and experiences with particular attention to feminist and ecological practices. They are the artistic director of Bioart Society, a Helsinki-based association working at the intersection of art, science and society. Alongside Jussi Koitela, Yvonne co-curated the exhibition "The pleasures we choose" for the Pavilion of Finland at the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. Previously she was associate curator at Frame Contemporary Art Finland for the "Rehearsing Hospitalities" public programme 2019 - 2023. In addition they work as a freelance curator, writer, editor and gardener.

    
The research and correspondence phase of Follow the Plants has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body. Support for the research phase of the project was provided by Bioart Society, Finland and a grant from Monash University Curatorial Practice. Creative Australia and Frame Contemporary Art Finland has awarded a grant towards a publication for the project.