Western understanding of humanity has permeated into different layers of cultural and societal considerations. The western master narrative has turned the understanding of what it means to be a human into the myth of “original unity, fullness,” stable and not subjected to changes (Haraway 2016, 8). Such a way of reasoning may result in ceasing…

“Knowledge in Making – Design by Doing” is the title of the Transmission in Motion seminar series. Its second session, moderated by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink, “Plant-based Dramaturgy”, took place on November 18, 2020. This session’s guest was a Chilean theatre director, scriptwriter and musician, Manuela Infante and she discussed the process of creating Estado Vegetal…

In the Transmission in Motion Seminar on plant-based dramaturgy, a talk was organized with Chilean theatre director, playwright and musician Manuela Infante. The talk was moderated by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink, who asked Infante about the artistic creation process of her work Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State). In this work, Infante explored plant-based logic to formulate several…

In the Transmission in Motion seminar on November 18th, entitled “Plant-based Dramaturgy”, Liesbeth Groot-Nibbelink interviewed Manuela Infante about her performance Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State, CIM/Ae 2017), and the creative process leading up to this theatre piece. Infante uses her theatre practice as a way of thinking through academic ideas based in fields such as speculative…

In a way, it is a miracle that a horticultural business exists, because in a sense you never buy one single plant. Rather, you acquire an ever-expanding, living organism which can easily be multiplied by cutting off a small section and planting that elsewhere – from those small cuttings, an entirely new plant grows. In theory,…

Manuela Infante, theatre director of Estado Vegetal, very matter-of-factly recounts the sequential nature of the production’s rehearsal process in the seminar session on ‘Plant-based Dramaturgy’ (18 Nov 2020). For her, the preparatory process undertaken always begins as “procedural,” or what I would interpret to be a task-based methodology. Crucially, Infante shares that her dramaturgical approach…

In her recent lecture for the TiM seminar series, Manuela Infante quoted plant philosopher Michael Marder with regard to the making of her piece Estado Vegetal (2017): “to recognize a valid ‘other’ in plants is also beginning to recognize that vegetal other within us” (Infante 2020). In order to make sense of the above quote,…

The Meet the Makers program aims to facilitate meetings and conversations between academic researchers and students, and makers – i.e. artists, curators, dramaturges, designers or other creative practitioners and professionals within the wider field of arts & culture. Interested in joining a session? Please send an email to tim@uu.nl! Want to know what happened during

This year’s Transmission in Motion seminar finds itself inspired by approaches to knowing that zoom in on experimental practices of ‘making’. Making, here, is understood as a form of ‘design by doing’. Such practices of designing a technological device, an artistic concept or a didactic plan embrace unpredictability and contingency by refraining from adhering to…

Following a focus on Loud tools, a Horizon of beats as measuring tools, an Infrastructure of theatrical tools and notes on The display as a publishing tool this is the last and final post in a series of short writings focusing on current perspectives and methods for measuring transmissions in motions. These posts are rooted…