Lecture Performance: Playing Dead - Plants, Archives and Time Travellers

This lecture performance follows the journeys of plants that arrived in Britain via the River Thames, often as part of colonial extraction, before being transformed into “productive” crops. This includes rubber, indigo and cinchona. Many of these plants have since been preserved within botanical collections for centuries. Yet across different cultural contexts, they are understood as kin, ancestors, and living entities.

What happens if we encounter these plants not as specimens, but as time travellers? How might we recognise their agency, and attend to the forms of witnessing and testimony they carry?

Working critically against the frameworks of Western scientific classification, the lecture explores how artistic practices can intervene in systems of naming, ordering and care. It asks what it might mean to reimagine the archive as a living, diasporic and contested space.

Drawing on the collections at Kew Gardens, particularly the Herbarium, the session approaches these sites as both repositories of knowledge and infrastructures of empire. Students are invited to think through speculative and material strategies for engaging with archives, opening pathways into and out of them.