The project ‘Vegetal Automates’ explores, through artistic practice, how we relate to plant life, reflecting on how our perception of plants would change if they suddenly began to move before our eyes.
Automaton for imagining nutations and tropisms, 2024
Installation with movement sensor. Mechanism, methacrylate box and dried plants
All plants move, even if humans do not usually perceive it. Autómata para imaginar nutaciones y tropismos [Automaton for imagining nutation and tropisms] aims to amplify – or rather to fictionalise – these movements and rhythms of plants, in order to seek a poetic approach to plants.
Nutation (from the Latin nutare, ‘to nod’ or ‘to sway’) is a back- and-forth movement characteristic of some parts of plants. As they grow, most of them describe a kind of upward spiral in space. Tropisms, on the other hand, are those growth movements guided towards (or against) an external stimulus, such as light, gravity or contact.
This automaton freely performs these movements, suggesting the visitor a kind of translation or approximation between human and plant temporalities.
Circumnutations, 2025
Single-channel video loop, 5 min 23 s
In the history of Western thought, plants have inhabited ‘the edge of the edge’, a zone of absolute darkness, as Michael Marder would say. Their apparent immobility is one of the factors that leads people to perceive them as a simple inanimate green curtain (a cognitive bias called plant blindness).
Circumnutaciones [Circumnutations] aims to bring certain plants to the fore, separating them from the idea of an undefined background. The focus is on those species that often go unnoticed, such as wild flora or the weeds that grow on wasteland. The plants in the video were collected and filmed in this type of environment, with special attention to the area around the LABoral building.
Circumnutaciones tries to imagine a series of movements that are atypical, but in fact not so far removed from what happens in plants on a smaller scale. The drawings by Darwin shown here analyse the movement described by some plants exposed to different stimuli, modifying the characteristic elliptical movement of circumnutation.
The piece aims to establish a dialogue with these plants, working from their vegetal materiality. It explores the stories we tell about them and the stories they can tell us.
Créditos/Credits
Autómata para imaginar nutaciones y tropismos – Lucía Batalla, Nicolás Batalla & Maarten Lauwers
Circumnutaciones – Lucía Batalla y Maarten Lauwers
Ilustraciones científicas extraídas de / Scientific illustrations extracted from: The Power of Movement in Plants(1880), Charles Darwin
Artist: Lucía Batalla Tuero
Work included in the exhibition: Terranautas
