The Coloniality of Planting with Ros Gray & Shela Sheikh
For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They will discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London.
Ros Gray is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is leading the preparation of the new MA Art & Ecology, which will launch in Autumn 2021. Her research has two trajectories: the first investigates militant filmmaking in contexts of revolutionary decolonial struggles, which is the subject of her monograph Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991 (2020); the second is concerned with artistic approaches to ecology, particularly artistic practice involving cultivation and soil care, multi-species entanglements and wildness. Ros is on the Editorial Board of Third Text and has organised numerous international academic and artistic publications and events. She co-ordinates Goldsmiths Allotment and is developing an Art Research Garden, also at Goldsmiths.
Shela Sheikh is Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy. A recent multi-platform research project around colonialism, botany and the politics of the planting includes ‘The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions’, a special issue of Third Text co-edited with Ros Gray (vol. 32, issue 2–3, 2018), and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018), co-edited with Uriel Orlow, as well as numerous workshops on the topic with artists, filmmakers and environmentalists. Her current research (including a monograph-in-progress) interrogates various forms of witnessing between the human, technological and environmental. Together with Wood Roberdeau, she co-chairs the Goldsmiths Critical Ecologies Research Stream (https://criticalecologies.gold.ac.uk).
