28 Aug 2026 16:00 — 18:00
Location: Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden outdoor garden and OOO Radio
Image: Jorge Menna-Barreto and Marcelo Wasem, Restauro: Environmental Sculpture, 2016-17.
Gather with us in Helsinki's Kaisaniemi Botanic outdoor gardens and on the OOO Radio airwaves for a late afternoon listening session.
With live readings from Follow the Plants book contributors Joana Quiroga, Joss Allen and Sirkku Rosi, and recordings shared from those further afield including Alana Hunt, Annalee Davis, Christian Thompson, Mariana Martínez Balvanera and Zayaan Khan, the floor is also open for in person attendees to read and recite from the book or share their own stories of plant following through recipes, exercises, or found texts. We welcome you to bring plant snacks, and stories of plant resilience and plant companions.
To listen in remotely, join via the OOO Radio live broadcast.
Alana Hunt makes art, books, films and social interventions. Her life across Miriwoong, Gija and Gadigal Countries in Australia and her ongoing relationship with South Asia and with Kashmir in particular shapes her engagement with the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams. Alana’s work is shaped by a long-term forensic approach to artistic research; she works slowly and deliberately, often over many years. Collaboration and shared knowledge are central to her practice, much of which has been made alongside journalists, filmmakers, human rights defenders and lawyers to create work that resonates within the places it grows from and the worlds beyond.
Annalee Davis is a Caribbean visual artist, cultural activist and writer. Her work sits at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies by engaging with the particular landscape of Barbados. Her studio, located on a working dairy farm that operated historically as a seventeenth-century sugar cane plantation, offers a critical context for her practice. Drawing, walking, growing living apothecaries, composing herbaria and embroidering, Annalee’s work suggests strategies for repair and thriving while investigating the role of botanicals and living plots as sites of refusal, secular worship and healing.
Dr Christian Thompson AO is a Bidjara/Chinese-Australian contemporary artist whose work explores identity and history. Underpinned by his idea that to sing even one word of his Bidjara language means it cannot be described as extinct, Thompson uses the art context as a site to archive and present the practice of spoken language within the broader culture, occupyinga rare and powerful space.
Mariana Martínez Balvanera is a designer and artist working at the intersection of participatory art, architecture and social design. Her work focuses on the design of narrative, collaborative and transdisciplinary environments that promote exchange and a collective sense of place. In 2018, she co-founded COCINA COLABORATORIO, a mobile and on-site project that brings together farmers, scientists, creatives and chefs around the kitchen table to connect, exchange knowledge and prototype new transdisciplinary solutions to farming. From there she coordinates co-design processes, action research programmes and residencies in three localities and ecosystems in Mexico.
Sirkku Rosi works mainly with aquarelles and performance art. She is interested in the shared state of being between everything cellular: porous skin as a leaking border between one’s body and the environment, and the circulation of waters through our bodies and through the universe. Her works are about coexistence and sensuality in all bodies. In Rosi’s works, plants and humans decompose and sprout.
Zayaan Khan works in food justice, land justice and seed justice as a storyteller and transdisciplinary artist based in South Africa. Using various mediums, from writing and sonic works to ceramics and food transformation, Zayaan’s practice is deeply rooted in the local landscapes, drawing inspiration from its rich biodiversity and the enduring relationship between people, the land and the sea. She is currently focusing on the concept of Deathlife as a modality for healing towards a Practice in Light and Death, focusing on death as a multitudinal way of being. She is Head Librarian of the Seed Biblioteek, a seed library based in Cape Town that seeks to reconnect seed with story through artistic methodology, fostering relationships towards resilience and sovereignty.