Free Radicals: Attuning to Plants in Creative Practices

Somewhere along the way, we have lost touch with what it means to be with plants. In a desperate attempt to safeguard what remains of the more-than-human ecologies that enable life on Earth, humans of late capitalism place their faith in solutions that promise progress while leaving the underlying systems of extraction intact. Yet across many cultures and ways of knowing, co-existence has never been forgotten: plants are ancestors, teachers, collaborators, cosmological actors, and political agents. Plants are—and always have been—kin.

Published by Onomatopee, Free Radicals: Attuning to Plants in Creative Practices turns its attention to arts, design, and culture to navigate this friction. A collectively assembled toolkit—part manifesto, part gathering space—it brings together the work of 70 artists, designers, researchers, curators, scientists, local knowledge holders, gardeners, and educators who cultivate slow, messy, and reciprocal modes of collaboration between people and plants. Through essays, interviews, poetry, reflections, and recipes, the book proposes tools, approaches, and relational infrastructures for thinking-with plants in knowledge production—embodied, empirical, earthly—as rehearsals for better futures.

Critical Media Lab invites you to celebrate the publication of the book with the editors Linsey Rendell, Sasha Střelcová, and Iveta Černá and book contributors Gabriela Aquije Zegarra and Mary Maggic. The evening will open with an apero and collective annotation exercise to ground and extend the book’s glossary terms through participants’ situated practices. Followed by a conversation on the collective relational process of making a book, shaped by two years of research, encounters, and exchanges in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Hungary, Armenia, and the Czech Republic.

Programme

17:30-18:00
Apéro

18:00-18:40
Collective glossary exercise

18:40-19:30
Conversation

Bios

Linsey Rendell is a researcher, writer, editor, and gardener, thinking with the more-than-human to rehearse worlds otherwise. She is co-editor of this book, Free Radicals: Attuning to Plants in Creative Practices, and was co-curator of the lecture series Seeding Kinships, both with Sasha Střelcová. Linsey previously worked with rearc institute, SPACE10, and Planetary Praxis. She studies transversal design at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at HGK Basel, where she is researching queer-feminist critical theory, transitional affective infrastructures, and extractive zones. She likes readers, collective reading and writing, and reading on the radio. She is from Australia and based between London and Basel.

Sasha Střelcová is an author, curator, and educator whose practice moves across media, ecology, and design. A graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London, her background brings together classical music, contemporary music theory, and the collaborative infrastructures through which cultural work is developed and sustained. Through Haenke, a platform she co-founded with Julien Antih, she explores how plant knowledge might inform more attentive and reciprocal ways of living and making. She contributes regularly to international media and teaches academic courses on regenerative futures in creative practice. She initiated Free Radicals after having spent several years working across the arts–sustainability axis, and is co-editor of the book Free Radicals: Attuning to Plants in Creative Practices.

Iveta Černá is a cultural producer, curator, and editor working across art and ecology. She is interested in how our lives are embedded in a complex web of ecological, cultural, and political relationships, and how cultural practice can explore and reimagine these connections. Her work moves across exhibitions, live events, and various media, bringing different forms of knowledge into conversation. At the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, she co-developed Inspiration Forum Lab, an interdisciplinary residency and research programme, and worked on Future Landscapes, a transdisciplinary project exploring infrastructures and ecosystems through sound. She currently contributes to Free Radicals at Haenke, including the making of the book Free Radicals: Attuning to Plants in Creative Practices.

Pre-Read

Introduction to Free Radicals: Attuning to Plants in Creative Practices (PDF, Onomatopee, 2026)