What does it mean for a plant to remember? How do plants forget? And how might plants suggest new ways of engaging with the memory of web technologies?
This roundtable brings together Mimosa Pudica, a performative research project by Valentina Vetturi exploring plant memory and digital ecologies, and My-Hi, a consortium investigating microbial and hydroponic systems for sustainable futures. Their meeting at CIVA opens a cross-disciplinary conversation spanning artistic research, plant physiology, and environmental engineering—imagining how plants and microbes might guide us toward alternative modes of living and storing, remembering and forgetting, in an age of ecological and technological acceleration.
A round table with: Professor Neil Weily (UWE Bristol, Mi-Hy) , Dr. Ezgi Ogun Ramalhete (KU Leuven, Mi-Hy), Dr. Lenon Modesto (SONY Europe, Mi-Hy), Valentina Vetturi (Accademia Belle Arti Bari, NABA Rome, Mimosa Pudica)
Mimosa Pudica is a project granted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program
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Valentina Vetturi is a visual artist and researcher working at the intersection of performance, writing, and new media. Her long-term projects are influenced by open-source methodologies fostering transdisciplinary collaborations. Vetturi has been awarded the Italian Council research grant, she is adjunct professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bari and lecturer at NABA Academy if Fine Arts, Rome, and has presented her work internationally at institutions including MAXXI (Rome), MA*GA (Gallarate), Strauhof (Zurich), Tranzit.ro (Bucharest), and the Lagos Biennial (2024).
Mi-Hy, Microbial hydroponics project (project no: 101114746) brings together Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) technology and hydroponics, thereby introducing a prosthetic rhizosphere (an extended rhizosphere community) to the typically “soil-less” configuration of hydroponics systems. The project is funded through the European Innovation Council, and specifically the EU EIC Pathfinder Challenge “Carbon dioxide and nitrogen management and valorization”.
