"The earth is all alive and covered with papillae"

Book launch: Vegetabilt Liv og ontoSympati

A Danish translation of the essay 'Vegetal life and ontoSympati' by Jane Bennett

accompanied by a cross-disciplinary conversation between professor in political science Lars Tønder and farmer Livia Urban Swart Haaland and poetry readings by poet and artist Lise Haurum and poet and artist Amalie Smith.

February 28th 2018, Litteraturhuset, Copenhagen

In the essay Bennett asks: Is it possible to rethink the figure of sympathy as a term that can be politically relevant, in the sense that it is fundamental for the being and for co-existence? To "experiment with the idea that there are strange attachments and dispatches between animal and vegetable bodies, a Sympathy that is not in the first instance a subjective emotion or sentiment but more like an impersonal mesh of affiliations between bodies  -  an onto-sympathy. "?

Bennett digs into this idea through an attempt to think with plants and plant connections. In an effort to do so, she creates an assemblage of voices of writers, poets, anthropologists, ethnographers, biologists etc. who all try to pay attention and address these connections, attractions and not least the interdependences between them and their surroundings, between plants and us.