Angela Jerardi is a curator and writer who mostly lives in Amsterdam. Her activities amalgamate around a constellation of interests including: divergent ways of knowing, collective models of working, and the exploration of play and humor as a pedagogical and exhibition-making methodology. Her research focuses on a knot of cultural phenomena, including: utopian thinking, sanitation, absurd tools, speculative futures and socioeconomic botany. She completed the de Appel Curatorial Programme in 2013, and has an academic background in cultural anthropology.
Motivated by an interest in the collective resource of plant-based sustenance and the nascent field of plant neurobiology, her current research intertwines the human regulatory perspective of international legislation of food security and plant resources and the study of plant intelligence as it relates to the uniqueness of plants’ “sessile life style,” living literally rooted in place. Central to this study are pieces of proposed and active legislation regarding plant genetic resources, and the restriction of their movement and exchange. Despite their lack of legibility, these legislative documents have potentially far reaching impact on the availability of plant-based food in the future. An oft-quoted statistic estimates that there are over 20,000 species of edible plants in the world yet fewer than 20 species currently provide 90% of our food. Thus wild-sourced foods and seed saving and exchanging will become increasingly important in the years to come. Meanwhile the recent development of the human study of plant intelligence has developed new thinking on plant interspecies cooperation and communication, such as in subterranean forest networks and in their sophisticated use of biochemistry. This research can then perhaps offer a reflective critique to the perceived singularity of our species, and more broadly of animalian forms of life.
