ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the marginalized containment of plants in US cities, where they often are treated as background décor to human action rather than as vital to life. It posits that the work of performance artists Vaughn Bell and Meghan Moe Beitiks highlights playful performance practices that subvert constructed divides between people and plants through small moments of human and vegetal interaction. For example, Bell (2006a) invites people to wear plant biospheres on their heads, so they can inhabit plants’ homes, while Beitiks (2010) goes jogging with an English Ivy, exchanging gases with it as they go. Through such micro-performances, Bell and Beitiks transplant vegetal life from the background of human action to the center. Performing “transplantment,” the artists traverse spatial demarcations between humans and plants and highlight vegetal experiences and traits. They critique the marginalization of plants and imagine an alternate ecology, in which plants inhabit the same spaces as urbanites.
