Notes on plant companionship: from Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium to Jumana Manna’s Foragers

Abstract

In this article, the author proposes thinking of Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium as a manifestation of plant companionship, a term she uses to describe the practice of noticing plant life and acknowledging it for what it is, caring for and about it, protecting and defending it, and remaining humbly open to what we do not (yet) know about it. She traces an ecofeminist genealogy of plant companionship by gleaning connections between Luxemburg’s political ecology and the work of contemporary women artists who engage with the politics of human relationships with plants – Milena Bonilla, Marwa Arsanios and Jumana Manna – as well as John Berger’s writings and drawings that highlight the epistemic and ontological openness that is required of humans in life-affirming engagements with the nonhuman. Relationally thinking about struggles from different geographies and temporalities, the author believes, can draw together the two most pressing causes of our time – human liberation and earth liberation.