**Here, plants are used to explore three different western ontological concepts that are meant to challenge our assumptions about existence and definitions of reality.** 

  
**Simone Weil’s “The Need for Roots”**

  
_“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future … Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”_ 

  
Simone Weil argued that, when a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. For Weil, uprooting of humans occurs when we are prevented from becoming active participants in our communities. 

  
During the opening of the show, viewers were invited to remove peashoots one at a time and transplant them into a new container. By engaging directly in the uprooting of the plant, participants are able to physically feel the impact of tearing roots from an established plant in order to re-locate it. How will this impact the growth of the uprooted plants in a new environment? What are some direct parallels we can infer from the experience of the plant and the human experience of being uprooted ? What are some ways that humans experience being uprooted (be it directly, such as through colonialism and slavery, or more indirectly through media and culture?) 
  
  
**Soren Kierkegaard “NonConformity”**

**\~ What We Think We Need \~**

  
_“One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.”_

  
The base of this project it to use plants to demonstrate the value of introspection as described by Soren Kierkegaard. While some philosophers are of the opinion that too much introspection leads to narcissism, Kierkegaard believes that it is only through inner contemplation, and prolonged isolation, that humans can discover their true selves. He uses the metaphor of a lettuce heart to describe this concept: as lettuce grows, the mature external leaves are used to shelter and protect the tender, delicate heart that it forms. To Kierkegaard, the heart can only be formed through time and isolation. Two lettuce hearts are forming in front of you under two different conditions to see how social factors might affect the morphology of the plant. Starting with romaine lettuce seedlings of the same family, each plant will have the opportunity to form over the month in the gallery, exposing them to identical environmental conditions (light, temperature, water, nutrients etc…) but placing them in different social situations. These different social situations will be the lettuce seedlings growing a) alone, to demonstrate true isolation of the individual b) with “sibling” plants, to demonstrate impact of family and with companion plants, different species but proven to be beneficial, to explore impact of mutualism/friendship. During the closing of the show, I will peel away the external leaves of each plant to determine the impact of the social environment on the morphology of the heart. I will subsequently reflect on the results and offer my own thoughts on the benefits of introspection as a response to Kierkegaard’s theory. 

  
**Plato “Allegory of the Cave”** 

**\~ What We Think We Know \~**

  
_“Life is like being chained up in a cave forced to watch shadows flitting across a stone wall.”_

  
Plato’s most famous work makes an ontological claim that what we claim to see is mostly illustory, projections based on our own, limited view of the world. To Plato, nothing in the world is real–they are shadows, and, when we make an effort to look outside the cave, beyond the shadow, we often see a very different reality, and become closer to attaining true knowledge. 

Look at the shadow? What do you see ? Look at the object – does it correspond to the image you had in your mind ? 

  

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Julie Buisson

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