Anette Vandsø. Plant fever: Countering Plant Deafness via ‘Houseplant art’

Anette Vandsø

Plant fever: Countering Plant Deafness via ‘Houseplant art'
 

We live in an era in which everything from the smallest flower to the broadest landscape is experienced and discussed in relation to environmental degradation unfolding on a global scale. One could even argue that plants have become primary sites where these translations between the local and the planetary, the human and the more-than-human, are experienced. In the research project Hidden Plant Stories, this contemporary sensibility – which we have elsewhere termed an “expanded aesthetics”– is developed into an approach for exploring houseplants in nineteenth-century paintings.

In this presentation, I will introduce this approach and show what happens when it is applied to specific artworks, collections of “houseplant art,” and curatorial practices, as we did in the exhibition trilogy Plantfever – The World on the Windowsill. I propose this work as a form of counterculture that not only challenges plant blindness, but also counters what I call “plant deafness”: our inability to listen to the layered stories of care, gender, class, coloniality, planetarity, and ecology in which both we and the houseplant have taken root.

Anette Vandsø is an associate professor in Aesthetics and Culture, and co-director of the research programme Environmental Media and Aesthetics at Aarhus University. Her current research explores the aesthetics and culture of environmental concerns often with a focus on ubiquitous phenomena of plants and sound. Vandsø is PI on several research and dissemination projects on environmental humanities in collaboration with art museums, including Hidden Plant Stories (2023-2026) partnering Ordrupgaard, the Hirschsprung Collection, and Faaborg museum, supported by the Velux Foundation, and The Garden (2016-2020) in collaboration with ARoS. Latest publications include The Botanical grotesque, 2026, the co-authored book Plantfever – the World on the Windowsill, 2025, and the projects ‘position paper’ Hidden Plant Stories, 2025.

Æstetisk Seminar er tilrettelagt af Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen og Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.

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