Produced by Decosm
Project Leads: Umi Lovecraft and Neba Sere
Music and Sound Design by Sami El-Enany
Artificial, Design Museum
How do different spaces, voices, and knowledge systems shape and alter our emotional and material relationships with plants?
Ancestral Plants: Anarchive invites you to decolonise your understanding of plants by examining the relationship between anthropocentrism and colonisation. Neba Sere and Umi Lovecraft reflect on the top-down structures of Western plant archives—dominated by hierarchies and classification systems—and contrast this with the highly emotional and sensuous legacies of plant displacement, commodification, and extraction.
The research starts with five key plants: banana, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, and sugar—cash crops that have played a foundational role in British economic wealth and continue to shape global consumption habits and exploitative labour conditions.
Anarchive opens up a space for care, collective learning, and reconnection to devalued plant knowledge. Reimagining a new form of archive through oral histories, intangible knowledge systems, and sensory entanglement, her work gently guides us towards listening to, and learning from, the more-than-human world.
Produced by Decosm
Project Leads: Umi Lovecraft and Neba Sere
Music and Sound Design by Sami El-Enany
Artificial, Design Museum
How do different spaces, voices, and knowledge systems shape and alter our emotional and material relationships with plants?
Ancestral Plants: Anarchive invites you to decolonise your understanding of plants by examining the relationship between anthropocentrism and colonisation. Neba Sere and Umi Lovecraft reflect on the top-down structures of Western plant archives—dominated by hierarchies and classification systems—and contrast this with the highly emotional and sensuous legacies of plant displacement, commodification, and extraction.
The research starts with five key plants: banana, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, and sugar—cash crops that have played a foundational role in British economic wealth and continue to shape global consumption habits and exploitative labour conditions.
Anarchive opens up a space for care, collective learning, and reconnection to devalued plant knowledge. Reimagining a new form of archive through oral histories, intangible knowledge systems, and sensory entanglement, her work gently guides us towards listening to, and learning from, the more-than-human world.
