Theatre Journal

Abstract:

The performativity of plant life in the museum space has opened new thinking around temporality and survival. This essay examines the installations Extinct in New York, an exhibition of extinct plant life once native to New York City but now unable to grow in the wild due to urbanization, and Ori Gersht’s Fragile Land, a photography project of native endangered Israeli flora shown at the explosive moment of being shot by an air rifle. The use of plants in installation practice asks wildlife to perform for viewers on the stage of the museum pedestal, and thus raising performative questions beyond their biological realities. Survival comes to mean more than mere life, and instead an analytic of radical survival is introduced to incorporate the rooted, immanent nature embedded in these exhibitions. The essay considers the survival tactics learned and experienced by these plants, and how these new lessons of liveness and presence can serve us “now.”