Call for Papers: Plant Histories, Plantation Architectures
A two-chapter interdisciplinary symposium taking place in Singapore and Rome discussing the history of architecture in terms of plants and the plantation system.
The
symposium is organized by the research group 鈥淰oyaging Vapors: Plant
Histories of Plantation Architectures鈥 led by Dr. Will Davis at the
Universit脿 della Svizzera italiana (USI), with Dr. Rixt Woudstra
(University of Amsterdam), Siddharta Perez (NUS Museum), and Pina Kalina
Haas (USI). The symposium is funded by the and is organized in collaboration with and support from , (Nparks), , the (Rome), and .
Description
Palm
leaves loosely thatched create a bushy screen wall. The screen is part
of a large building designed to shelter the pieces of other plants and
make them dry out quickly. They are tobacco leaves, hanging from the
rafters in neat rows swaying in the breeze. Nearby, the dried ones are
being plucked and gathered into sorting bags, where they find themselves
stacked by quick fingers into piles of like-colored leaves and pressed
into baskets woven from the fronds of the pandanus plant. Finally, they
are stowed into ships built with trees far from home, hulls of oak and
elm, decks of pine. Altogether, they will float back towards Europe.
Dry, sort, stack, press, stow, sell.
The
plantation system is a term used to describe forms of monocrop
agricultural land use, of shaping land after the cultivation of single
crops in climates suitable to them. Scholarly discourse in recent years
has traced the historical genealogies of extraction and
de-diversification of the natural world that the system, with its
rapacious claims to territory over four centuries, has come to
represent. Because of their low seasonal variation and consistent
sunlight, tropical zones鈥攁lso some of the most biodiverse places in the
world鈥攈ave historically been sites where the most intense forms of
plantation agriculture took place. In a broader sense, from at least the
seventeenth century on, the plantation system fundamentally altered how
people perceived land, property, plants, people, and their
environments. Artificial species flows combined with trade and commerce
created a disembodied system with disastrous consequences for the
ecological complexity of the world and its climate.
The
recognition of this system has led to contemporary shifts in
perspectives of the environment, that it is interconnected and needs
diversity in order to thrive, revealing the extent to which a
reimagining of existence outside of plantation logics is necessary.
Conceptually, therefore, to understand the history of the plantation is
also a method to understand its opposite: biological complexity and
inter-species flourishing.
Architecture
has had a troubled historical relationship to plantation environments.
As an ordering system, dwelling device, and apparatus for synthetic
plant growth, one can project a range of examples. In Europe these range
from the stately residences in the British countryside of erstwhile
plantation owners in the Caribbean to greenhouses for testing banana
plant hybrids to tobacco auction houses in Amsterdam. Geographically
removed, yet deeply intertwined are the examples in Europe鈥檚 elsewheres:
coffee processing warehouses under a tropical sun, watchtowers framing
their perimeter, rudimentary barracks for workers; and as counterpart,
examples of living outside of or in spite of the plantation system, such
as maroon communities and so-called slave gardens.
What
can plants tell us about these stories, and in what ways do plant
histories diversify our understanding of the plantation system and its
architectures?
This
two-chapter symposium is interested in the entangled histories that the
plantation system produced, and each location is chosen for its
historical role in specific plantation stories. Singapore Botanic
Gardens was founded in 1859 under the auspices of an Agri-Horticultural
society for research and experimentation and played host to a series of
botanists and plant explorers as a place to grow, experiment, and
distribute potentially useful plants (among others, one early success
was the cultivation and propagation of Hevea brasiliensis,
Para Rubber). Chapter 1, 鈥淧lant Histories鈥 takes place in two former
colonial bungalows designed by architect Alfred J. Bidwell at the turn
of the century that are now part of Singapore Botanic Gardens鈥 recent . Chapter 2, 鈥淧lantation Architectures鈥 takes place in ,
the former home of Emilio Maraini who made his fortune in sugar beet
plantations and refineries centered in Terni, Italy. The villa was
designed by Maraini鈥檚 brother, Otto Maraini in 1905, and stands on an
artificial hill (a former dump) in the Ludovisi district of Rome where
since 1948 it has played host to the activities of the Swiss Institute.
Plant
Histories focuses on the stories that plants tell about the plantation
system in monsoon Asia. This first chapter of the symposium invites
contributions that explore how people use plants in/as architecture,
plants that travel between places, ethnobotanical relationships on and
around plantations, and the historical connections that shaped the
environment, people, and architecture on plantations. We are also
interested in contributions (papers, performances, artworks) that
reflect on the methodological challenges and affordances of
thinking-with plants and their histories.
Chapter 2: Plantation Architectures Swiss Institute (Rome), 25鈥27 March, 2026
Plantation
Architectures re-centers the plantation as a system not only rooted in
colonial geographies but also within Europe itself. In this second
chapter of the symposium we welcome contributions that critically engage
with the selective remembering of the past, and how Europe's distance
from sites of plantations obscured its role in the system even as it
universalized itself globally. How have social, spatial, and
architectural modalities informed this obfuscation? How have European
claims to cosmopolitanism been grounded in histories of violence and
extraction? In what ways do buildings, as architectural objects part of
urban landscapes, reflect these underpinnings?听
General Information
Interested
participants decide which chapter they would like to attend and
indicate this in their submission. A travel bursary will be available
for a limited number of participants. Please indicate in your proposal
if you do not have institutional funding and require travel support. The
conference language will be English. All presentations are to be made
in person unless urgent circumstances prevent attendance. If
participants need childcare or any other accommodations, please let us
know so that it can be arranged.
Submission
Please send your abstract (max. 350 words), a short CV (max. 1 page), and preferred location of participation to: voyaging.vapors@usi.ch
by 31 August, 2025. Notifications will be sent out in September. The
program for each chapter of the symposium will be announced in October.
