In this special episode, writer Jessica J. Lee joins EMPIRE LINES live with visual artist and researcher Iman Datoo to explore the languages of ‘natural’ history and invasive species, through their book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging (2024).

Bringing together memoir, history, and scientific research, writer Jessica J. Lee considers how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they cross borders. Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, Jessica often draws on her own lived experiences to observe our world in motion, and close connections between seemingly distant places - sometimes, with shared tastes for seaweed. Dispersals, their latest book of linked essays, journeys further still, exploring migrations, displacements, and the entanglements of the plant and human worlds - and the language we use to describe them.

Jessica shares some of their influences and references, like Richard Mabey’s Weeds and the works of Mary Douglas, to expose our historic human and anthropocentric understanding of plant life. We discuss how our everyday words and phrases are often borrowed from citizenship law, and see how beings are mis/represented in the media, from giant hogweed in Victorian England, to wakame kelp, Japanese knotweed, and eucalyptus plants today. Drawing on their work across the South West of England, Iman Datoo shares their research into soils, potatoes, and tea. Bringing together Iman and Jessica’s works, installed at the exhibition, Invasion Ecology, at Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, we also delve into the history of botanical illustrations and mapping as tools of colonialism - here reimagined by contemporary artists.

This episode was recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024.

Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee is published by Penguin, and available in all good bookshops and online.

Watch the full video online, via Radical Ecology: vimeo.com/995973173

Find all the links in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C9hjlxrIcgo

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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