26–29.8.2026

Bioart Society and Food Art Research Network invite you to join us for a lively research assembly to celebrate and activate the newly launched publication Follow the Plants, edited by Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore, and published by Discipline and Onomatopee.

Follow the Plants gathers artists, writers and researchers who engage with plants as collaborators, teachers, and political agents, and engages critical research by interrogating the economic, political, and colonial forces that have shaped human-plant relations.

The book’s contributions invite us into processes of encounter and entanglement that explore intersections of art, science and ecology, through diverse knowledges and situated practices. In response, the assembly establishes correspondences between the publications contributions, and local practitioners, places and publics in Helsinki, inviting further processes of collective research to unfurl beyond the page.

This free, multi-day open programme brings research to life through film, performance and social practice. Both theoretical and embodied, it unfolds through growing, cultivation and food-based practices, situating artistic research within the creative lives of plants.

Contributors

Event programme curated by Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore, featuring: Edible Archives (Shalini Krishan and Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar), Joana Quiroga, Joona Sorsa, Katie Lenanton, Kyriaki Goni, Margherita Pevere, Matti Aikio, Nathalie Muchamad, Rubiane Maia, Sepideh Rahaa, Sirkku Rosi, Sonja Donner.

Film programme curated by Danai Anagnostou, featuring: AK Wane, Alana Hunt, Barbara Hammer, Catriona Gallagher, Elia Nurvista, Otar Iosseliani, Theo Panagopoulos, Yugantar Collective.

Assembly programme

All Follow the Plants Research Assembly programme is free of charge but some venues have limited capacity. Registration opens in early August.

Wednesday 26 August
18:00-21:00 Menu and meal by Edible Archives (Shalini Krishan and Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar), Joona Sorsa and Sonja Donner.
Venue: Koekeittiö / Test Kitchen

Thursday 27 August
17:00-18:30 Book launch with readings and presentations by editors Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore and contributors Kyriaki Goni and Matti Aikio. Drinks by Katie Lenanton.
Venue: HAM – Helsinki Art Museum

Friday 28 August
11:00-14:00 Follow the Plants x Kenno Filmi film program, curated by Danai Anagnostou, featuring AK Wane, Alana Hunt, Barbara Hammer, Catriona Gallagher, Elia Nurvista, Otar Iosseliani, Theo Panagopoulos, Yugantar Collective.
Venue: Cinema Orion

16:00-18:00 Garden readings with OOO Radio and Follow the Plants contributors near and far, including Joana Quiroga and Sirkku Rosi.
Venue: Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden, outdoor garden and broadcast on OOO Radio

Saturday 29 August
14:00-16:00 Breadfruit workshop with Nathalie Muchamad
17:00-21:00 Performance program with Margherita Pevere, Sepideh Rahaa and Rubiane Maia.
Venue: HIAP Gallery Augusta

Partners and funders

The assembly programme is realised in a city wide partnership and will take place at HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme, Helsinki Art Museum, Kaisanemi Botanic Garden (outdoor garden) with OOO Radio, Cinema Orion with Kenno Filmi, and Koekeittiö / Test Kitchen.

The assembly is generously funded by Saastamoinen Foundation with support from the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland and AVEK, Mediarata 9.

The Follow The Plants book is published by Onomatopee and Discipline, and funded by Creative Australia, Saastamoinen Foundation, Frame Contemporary Art Finland and the University of East London Sustainability Research Institute.

Research assembly contributor bios

Event programme:

Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar, co-founder of Edible Archives, is an artist, curator, and chef whose practice engages food as a sensory, cultural, and mnemonic medium, carrying histories of land, labour, care, and survival within the fragile archive of the human body. Her work examines how taste, memory, ecology, and embodied knowledge shape collective and individual archives. Trained academically with a PhD in Cognitive Linguistics from the University of Delhi, Anumitra integrates intellectual inquiry with hands-on culinary craft.

Edible Archives, a restaurant and art /research project based in Anjuna, Goa, works with indigenous ingredients at the intersection of art, culture and food. Edible Archives was one of the Infra Projects at the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018-19, where it showcased 30 varieties of indigenous rice. Since then, Edible Archives has also showcased its unique approach to food and art at the Islamic Arts Biennale 2025; participated in art residencies (ranging from Suzhou, PRC to rural Karnataka to Ladakh) and has been a member of the Food Art Research (FAR) Network since 2020.

With an academic background in Philosophy, Joana Quiroga became a visual artist to give Philosophy a closer presence to everyday life. With her work, she investigates how different power relations, and their consequent inequalities, can live hidden in our daily lives. At the moment she is a PhD researcher at University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland, with a project about inequality through bread and wheat, specially focusing their presence in Brazil, asking also how this may have influenced our (western) way of thinking and our body consistencies.

Joona Sorsa is a cook and occasional artist too. His work ranges from a normal kitchen professional (catering, kitchen work, etc.) to events, installations, performances and exhibitions. Joona runs Koekeittiö, a test kitchen for artists working with different culinary practices and edible material, with 5 other artists.

Katie Lenanton (she/her) is an intersectional feminist curator, researcher, writer, and editor. She works with mediums like exhibition-making, social practice, wildcrafting, conceptual cocktails, installations, participatory sculptures, scent, sustenance, and publishing. Her practice is collective and site-specific, often taking the form of gatherings, workshops, and collective writing. Active in the cultural field since 2003, her roots are in DIY communities, contemporary art, publishing, and community organising and is a co-founder of Feminist Culture House (2019-present).

Kyriaki Goni is a multidisciplinary artist based in Athens, Greece. She works across media, merging CGI video, textiles, drawings, coding, sound, websites, sculpture to build immersive and multilayered environments, connecting the local with the planetary, the fictional with the scientific. She focuses on extractivism, surveillance, human and other than human relations, alternative networks and infrastructures of care and community.

Madeleine Collie is a curator, writer, and researcher based in London and Melbourne/Naarm who activates research and creates platforms for engaging with the politics and poetics of plants. They initiated the Food Art Research Network in 2020 as a platform for peer learning and slow, curatorial research. She is co-editor of Earth Ethics: Art, Institutions and Regenerative Practices (Monash University Publishing, 2025), and Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food in Asia and Australia (Routledge, 2026) and currently holds a Curatorship at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London (2026-27).

Known for her otherworldly work with living matter, ecology and biotechnology, Dr Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher addressing taboos like death, sex and vulnerability. Her practice embraces object-making, installation, performance, and writing, which she waves seamlessly thanks to her transdisciplinary background. A member of the Bioart Society since 2017, her dialogue with its cosmos has unfolded through workshops, shows, art talks, and the publications.

Matti Aikio is a Sámi visual artist rooted in Finnish Sápmi, who intricately explores the aftermath of colonial contact zones between Finnish, Danish-Norwegian, Swedish, and Norwegian settlers and the Sámi people. Drawing from his background in Sámi reindeer herding culture, Aikio delves into pressing issues, as well as the history of land rights, skillfully blending moving images, sound, text, and still imagery in his installations.

Nathalie Muchamad was born in New Caledonia, Pacific Ocean. She is now based at Mayotte, Comoro Archipel. Her work is articulated through video, drawing, text, installation. She takes into account a geography and its history exploring the notion of multiplicity in a connected and multipolar world. Muchamad explores the role of trade and commodity in colonialism, she proposes research on the history of spices and plants in a Plantationocene context where the conditions of establishment of the populations of European overseas territories are linked to the spice and plant trade.

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist based in Folkestone, United Kingdom. Her practice encompasses performance, installation, photography, video, writing, and collage, operating at the intersection of embodied experience, language, memory, organic matter, and processes of transformation. Her work explores diverse states of perception, attention and relationality, with a particular interest in the interdependent networks that connect human and more-than-human worlds, including plants, minerals, and landscapes.

Sepideh Rahaa is a multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki, Finland. She investigates and questions prevailing power structures, social norms, and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling, and everyday life and resistances. She aims to initiate and create spaces for dialogue, influenced by feminist politics, decolonial and postcolonial theories and practices as well as social and environmental justice. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University.

Shalini Krishan is a co-founder of Edible Archives and a committed queer feminist with significant experience in the organizing, functioning and archiving of queer activist collectives and resource groups, including Qashti and the Delhi Queer Pride Committee. In her previous life as editor for independent Indian publishing houses, Shalini supported writing on environmental justice, sustainability, and biodiversity. Presently, she is co-writing a book based on culinary and medicinal traditions in India and China.

Sirkku Rosi 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 circulation of waters through our bodies and the universe. Her works are about coexistence, sensuality in all bodies and shared cellular breathing. In Rosi´s works, plants and humans are laying around, decomposing and sprouting. Works have a diminutive carnival of the flesh.

Sonja Donner works with the material and emotional traces that human life leaves on its surroundings. Using multisensory, lyrical, sculptural, and culinary forms of expression, Donner observes the subtle boundaries of a work’s dramaturgical presence, as well as the potential of the mundane, accumulative material to function as an emotionally and narratively charged, performing subject. Donner is a founding member of Koekeittiö (eng. Test Kitchen), an art space dedicated to intersections of food and art. Donner lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

Film programme:

AK Wane is an artist, writer and curator from Dakar, Senegal, currently based in Helsinki, Finland. They work primarily in video, in between experimental and documentary practices, to give voice to historically underrepresented people. They work within and without the archive, searching for meaning in what has been told and what has not. They will be in residence at Jan Van Eyck Maastricht in 2026.

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.

With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer is recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema. Working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories, women’s health and aging, and global political struggles. Guided by her urgent need to document communities rarely represented in mainstream cinema, she asserted that “radical content deserves radical form.” Using documentary and found footage, her works are characterized by her robust experimentation with montage, superimposition, and overexposure.

Catriona Gallagher is a visual artist and filmmaker working between the UK and Greece. Her work probes at the collision of manmade and natural worlds, navigating overlooked details in our physical surroundings and their mirroring psychological landscapes. She uses moving image, drawing, writing, and research processes to map physical and conceptual traces of human and non-human relations. Her work has been shown in film festivals and exhibitions in the UK, USA, Italy, France, Ireland and Greece, where she co-founded A – DASH project space in Athens in 2016.

Danai Anagnostou is a producer for film and artist moving images and a doctoral candidate at Aalto University. In 2019, she co-founded Kenno Filmi, a production company in Helsinki that hosts projects by international filmmakers, researchers, and artists. Her research is situated at the intersection of production studies and production history, emphasizing the histories of feminist film collectives and women’s collaborative praxis, aiming to identify methods and practices for reconstructing and reactivating unofficial and incomplete archives. She is conducting this study with the support of the Kone Foundation (2022-2026).

Elia Nurvista is an Indonesian artist and independent artistic researcher whose work examines the politics of food through contemporary art, research, and pedagogy. Using food as a social, political, and ecological lens, she explores labor, extraction, everyday consumption, and collective knowledge, while tracing their entanglements with ecology, gender, class, and geopolitics. In 2015, she initiated Bakudapan Food Study Group, a Yogyakarta-based artistic research collective focused on studying food within broader cultural and political contexts.

Otar Iosseliani initially studied mathematics and physics at Moscow State University before transferring to the state film institute (VGIK) to study film directing. His graduation film, April (1961), was denied theatrical distribution by the authorities and to obtain his diploma and continue working, he took a job at the Rustavi metallurgical factory. This firsthand experience directly shaped his documentary Cast Iron (Tuji, 1964). Iosseliani’s subsequent films faced systematic suppression, severe distribution restrictions, or were shelved for years. In France, he established a second chapter of his career, directing a long series of highly acclaimed features and documentaries.

Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker and academic based in Scotland. His work explores themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identity and language in an equally sensitive and political way.

Yugantar was India’s first feminist film collective. Founded by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Baiya, Navroze Contractor and Meera Rao in 1980 the collective developed four films together with existing or ensuing women’s groups: with domestic workers in Pune (Molkarin, 1981), female factory workers in Nipani (Tambaku Chaakila Oob Aali / Tobacco Embers, 1982), with Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, a feminist research and activist collective in Hyderabad (Idi Katha Maatramena / is this just a story?, 1983) and with members of the Chipko environmental movement (Sudesha, 1983).