Estado Vegetal is Manuela Infante’s riveting piece of experimental performance art through which plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world. The book Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking, edited by Giovanni Aloi, is the first book dedicated to this performance and features essays from scholars and artists, including a fictional continuation of Infante’s work by Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Here, Infante and Wong join Art after Nature series editors Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard in conversation.


Manuela Infante is a Chilean playwright, director, screenwriter, and musician who creates her own performances and tours in America, Europe, and Asia. Her works include Estado Vegetal and Metamorphosis. 

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. She is an award-winning author whose books include The Box and Drafts of a Suicide Note.

Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press.


A performance of Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State), performed by Marcela Salinas, is available to watch on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_9tGnvu3w8&t=8s


Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/series/art_after_nature



Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking is available from University of Minnesota Press. The volume includes pieces by Maaike Bleeker, Lucy Cotter, Prudence Gibson, Michael Marder, Dawn Sanders, Catriona Sandilands, Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, and Mandy-Suzanne Wong. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/estado-vegetal



Episode references:
The Conquest of America / Tzvetan Todorov
Capitalist Realism / Mark Fisher
Horizon / Manuela Infante

Art, time, nonlinearity with Manuela Infante and Mandy-Suzanne Wong (Art after Nature 5)

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

Art, time, nonlinearity with Manuela Infante and Mandy-Suzanne Wong (Art after Nature 5)

University of Minnesota Press

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