Image: Book design by Zenobia Ahmed. Cover Image: The Resilient scars map, realised by the citizens of Santa Comba Dão, part of the project Lament by Margherita Pevere. Slide design by Mariana Martínez Balvanera.
 

*Please note this event is now fully booked*

Come raise a glass with us in an evening of readings and reflections to celebrate the launch of our newly published book Follow the Plants, edited by Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore, and published by Discipline and Onomatopee.  

Attentive to plants as agents, interlocutors and companions in world making, the book explores how following plants can reorient aesthetic, political and epistemic questions, cultivating new ways of attending to collectivity, interdependence and plant–human relations in artistic research.

During the event, editors Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore will introduce the book and expand on how contributors approach following plants across time and terrain. Contributor Matti Aikio joins to read sections from his text “Reindeer Follow Plants, Mushrooms and Lichen (and We Follow Reindeer)” reflecting the fragile inter-dependencies of plant, animal and human life in Sámpi under threat an era of rapid climate change. Invited as a correspondent, Julia Kemppinen who studies tundra plants and microclimates in Sámpi in her role as assistant professor in biodiversity change, University of Helsinki, speaks to how scientific methods of following plants might benefit from being in dialogue with artistic methods and indigenous ways of knowing. Kyriaki Goni also thinks with plants and erasure in her text “Intertwined Silphium Dreams: Bodies and Territories as Contested Sites of Extraction” entangling storytelling, speculation, scientific data and traditional knowledges. Her performative reading conjures a doula’s dream following syphilium across millennia as it is pushed to the edge of extinction from overharvesting. She weaves this with the process of pregnancy, becoming a mother and thinking with the body while writing about this plant. 

Foraged and fermented drinks will be served by curator Katie Lenanton as part of her project Bar Tender, a mobile pop-up art bar, and a long-term relational artistic and curatorial project, drawing parallels between the labour and social dynamics of a curator and a bartender.

This event is a collaboration between Bioart Society, Food Art Research Network and HAM - Helsinki Art Museum. 

Venue: Seminar room, HAM - Helsinki Art Museum, Eteläinen Rautatiekatu 8, 00100 Helsinki

Access: HAM Tennis Palace is located in the Helsinki city centre right next to Kamppi Shopping Centre. The Book launch will happen in the seminar room, which is located on the second floor of Tennis Palace right next to the museum's ticket counter. Tennis Palace is fully accessible. 

Booking required: The space has limited capacity and is fully booked

The Follow The Plants book is published by Onomatopee and Discipline, and funded by Creative Australia, Saastamoinen Foundation, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University and the University of East London Sustainability Research Institute. Follow the Plants is supported through a Food Art Research Network and Bioart Society collaboration.

Follow the Plants is edited by Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore with contributions from AK Wane, Åsa Sonjasdotter, Alana Hunt, Annalee Davis, Banu Subramaniam, Beatriz Paz Jiménez, Christian Thompson, Clare Qualmann, Diana Vieira, Elia Nurvista, Franswa Tibere, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Grace Gloria Denis, Joana Quiroga, Johanes Jamil, Jorge Menna Barreto, Joshua Gebert, Joss Allen, Keg de Souza, Kristina Jones, Kyriaki Goni, Leone Contini, Lucy Davis, Madeleine Collie, Marta Fernández Calvo, Margherita Pevere, Matti Aikio, Mariana Martínez Balvanera, Nathalie Muchamad, Nida Sinnokrot (Sakiya), Nick Anderson, Rain Wu, Rubiane Maia, Shalini Krishan, Sirkku Rosi, Yvonne Billimore, Zayaan Khan and Zheng Bo. Designed by Zenobia Ahmed.

Launch event contributor bios:

Katie Lenanton (she/her) is an intersectional feminist curator, researcher, writer, and editor. She works with mediums like exhibition-making, social practice, wildcrafting, conceptual cocktails, installations, participatory sculptures, scent, sustenance, and publishing. Her practice is collective and site-specific, often taking the form of gatherings, workshops, and collective writing. Active in the cultural field since 2003, her roots are in DIY communities, contemporary art, publishing, and community organising and is a co-founder of Feminist Culture House (2019-present).

Kyriaki Goni is a multidisciplinary artist based in Athens, Greece. She works across media, merging CGI video, textiles, drawings, coding, sound, websites, sculpture to build immersive and multilayered environments, connecting the local with the planetary, the fictional with the scientific.  She focuses on extractivism, surveillance, human and other than human relations, alternative networks and infrastructures of care and community.

Madeleine Collie is a curator, writer, and researcher based in London and Melbourne/Naarm who activates research and  creates platforms for engaging with the politics and poetics of plants. They initiated the Food Art Research Network in 2020 as a platform for peer learning and slow, curatorial research. She is co-editor of Earth Ethics: Art, Institutions and Regenerative Practices (Monash University Publishing, 2025), and Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food in Asia and Australia (Routledge, 2026) and currently holds a Curatorship at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London (2026-27).

Matti Aikio is a Sámi visual artist rooted in Finnish Sápmi, who intricately explores the aftermath of colonial contact zones between Finnish, Danish-Norwegian, Swedish, and Norwegian settlers and the Sámi people. Drawing from his background in Sámi reindeer herding culture, Aikio delves into pressing issues, as well as the history of land rights, skillfully blending moving images, sound, text, and still imagery in his installations. 

Julia Kemppinen is a geographer asking ecological questions. Her research focuses on climate change impacts in northern ecosystems, particularly regarding tundra plants and microclimates. Kemppinen is the assistant professor in biodiversity change at the University of Helsinki.