Tales for the future of people and plants. A speculative performance in the botanic garden

This article describes the residency of the multimedia artist Karolina Grzywnowicz and a research team that accompanied her at the Botanic Garden of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In the first section the authors offer a critical analysis of the discourses produced by the Garden and embedded in the modernist paradigm where nature and culture are perceived as separate constructs. This paradigm is juxtaposed with the imagination crisis (in envisaging the spatial scale of ecological crises and their processes) and human responsibility. The second section focuses on a performance tour of the Garden prepared by Grzywnowicz and her team at the end of their two-week-long project. The authors analyse this event using the category of speculative practice proposed by Isabelle Stengers. How does the narrative constructed by the artist resonate within the discourse created by the Garden? Has the artist’s speculative practice resulted in an alternative approach to the human–matter relationship? Has it changed the way in which people think about the Garden