Organic Landscape in Human Geography

The solemn geographies of human limits
—Paul Eluard

Since 2017, I have developed a series of performances and garments in collaboration with plants. I started this project as a personal exploration of my relationship with nature, with living plants as the base material. This project, titled Organic Landscape in Human Geography, responds to the culture/nature paradigm I inherited from my theatre studies by questioning the acting technique of naturalism. I was taught that naturalist acting, in the lineage of Émile Zola’s philosophy, reproduces human nature with a certain scientific precision through acting techniques. I was told that if I trained my body to imitate behaviors sanctioned by the Western canon, I would eventually become an actor. But this acting technique, rooted in a universalized concept of “nature” and often detached from cultural or ecological context, pushed me to rebel. I began to explore the deeper layers of my own relationship with nature and to redefine what “human nature” could mean for me personally.

The first performance was inspired by a medieval engraving by Pieter Brueghel, Orson and Valentin. I set out to construct a full-body suit filled with living plants, which I called “Plant Man.” I built this suit inspired by my need to embody nature in a crude, uncomfortable, cumbersome, and literal way. Each time I placed a plant on my suit/body, I ensured that it held some meaning: the plant over my heart was a gift from my mother, the one on my shoulder was a cutting that I got on a trip, and the plant over my lungs helped me with my asthma. Each part of my body carries a plant that serves as a natural emblem, guiding me through the world and building collective narratives about plants.

While a character is a unified set of traits embodied in a single body, a forest is a dense congestion of symbols. It is the sum of sound, movement, symbols arranged by randomness, color, and the perpetual variation governed by life.

I am from Mexico City, and let me tell you that people there have a deeply complex relationship with nature. It was originally situated on an ancient lake and my ancestors gradually drained the valley to make way for concrete. They channeled rivers underground and cut down forests to build housing for over twenty-three million people. My city inspired me to construct my plant-body, a human silhouette overflowing with vegetation, because I suffered from the lack of it in my context. It has always saddened me to see how humans in large cities have relegated plants to recreational spaces such as parks and gardens, with little effort toward a sustainable and interconnected coexistence.

My goal with Plant Man was to break away from dramatic text and create a living entity, one not confined to theatrical reproduction. I wanted Plant Man to resemble a forest more than a theatrical character. While a character is a unified set of traits embodied in a single body, a forest is a dense congestion of symbols. It is the sum of sound, movement, symbols arranged by randomness, color, and the perpetual variation governed by life. Plant Man was a living being who, although he spent most of his time in the living room of my apartment, was destined to interact with society. To give shape to this idea, I designed a series of public performances that would help give meaning to his existence. These actions were structured around the life stages of a plant: Birth, Plant Communication, Plant Movement, Encounter with the Urban Environment, Encounter with the Rural Environment, Sense of Community, and the Construction of Society.

Embodying nature represents a response to this ongoing violence that humanity continues to inflict upon it, resisting the extractivist logic of depletion and constant dispossession.

For example, in the performance focused on the encounter with the rural context, I took Plant Man to meet cucumber farmers in Zacualpan de Amilpas, in the state of Morelos (about two hours away from Mexico City), to interact with them and interview them about their relationship with their plants. They shared with me the influence that music has on plant growth. As people deeply rooted in the Mexican countryside, they told me their cucumbers grew much better when they were sung to with ranchera music, especially when sung with passion. They taught me how to do it and showed me how they sang to their plants while cleaning the dried leaves. This experience became a performance that I later recreated with Plant Man, in which I sang to him so he would grow strong and healthy. Another example happened in the Mexico City metro: people watered me, talked to the plants on my body, and shared stories about their own plants…

“My mom had a poinsettia plant in the yard. When she died,
I worried about the poinsettia because my mom loved it very much.”

“Thank you for taking care of me. Thank you for watering me.”

The act became a way of embodying the collective memory of the human–nature relationship. This body of work became a living laboratory for the encounter between nature and society and to observe what this relationship had to show to me. The results of the experiment were revealing; I became a collector of anecdotes and acts of care for plants in public and private spaces.

Pablo Mukherjee argues that “colonialism and imperialism old and new, must be understood as a state of permanent war against the global environment.” If this is the case, how do we resist? How do we embody nature in a way that is neither patriarchal, neocolonial, nor anthropocentric? What forms of artistic practice counteract this ongoing war against the environment? If paradigms are inscribed within us (if we still carry the ancestral echo within our bodies), then perhaps performance, embodiment, and materiality can be combined to offer an answer. The stories of the people are archived within the body where plants grow; my body collects its own anecdotes and mythologies. Just as landscapes retain traces of human and ecological histories, the body acts as an archive, carrying the imprints of ancestral knowledge, ecological shifts, and cultural memory.

My need to embody nature is driven by an aesthetic-spiritual impulse, a way of viewing nature as an altar. This perspective acknowledges that within its chaos, abundance, and even cruelty, there exists inherent beauty and balance. I am aware that my relationship with nature is entangled in a violent, extractive, and abusive power dynamic, almost as though nature´s very essence is being denied. For me, embodying nature represents a response to this ongoing violence that humanity continues to inflict upon it, resisting the extractivist logic of depletion and constant dispossession.

Cultural anthropologist Thomas Csordas argues that embodiment is essential for understanding how people negotiate their sense of identity and reality in the world . In his view, the body is not an object of study in relation to culture; rather, it is understood as the subject of culture or, in other words, the existential basis of culture. According to his approach, bodily experiences are intrinsically linked to the formation of personal and collective identity, as well as to the way people make sense of their existence within a specific cultural context.

How does that process manifest in my body? My body becomes fertile soil for the germination of a seed. I want to have a collective point of view on the growth of the tree in my chest, I want to be part of the landscape, be part of the strange, have space in my body with an exuberant explosion of green. The dialectic of inside-outside of my body extends to textiles. I see clothing as a second skin; a garment can be understood as an extension, modification, or expansion of my own body. As Roach-Higgins and Eicher propose: "We define the self as a composite of individual identities communicated through dress, the bodily aspects of appearance, and discourse, as well as the material and social objects (other people) that give meaning to interaction situations." Internal and external perception play a key role in the use of the symbols I carry: territory, ancestors, and nature, which shape how I choose to present myself through every performative act, including the clothing I wear. Textiles, as another “self” that holds “self,” can serve as corporeal archive: materials that inscribe histories, relationships, and ecological memories.

As a research method, my work interrogates: Can the contemporary body resist both the impact of current forces and the consequences of historical ones? How can performance function as a methodology for facilitating communicative processes that lead to a new or renewed form of community thinking?

The challenge is not to resist the attacks of global warming and the rising of the seas; it is to face the loss of a part of us.

From a Latin American perspective my work resonates with the textiles of southern Mexico and Guatemala. Most of them feature embroidered geometric patterns, birds, and plants; these icons represent or reproduce the territory and the living beings that inhabit it. Clothing thus becomes a means of communication that allows people to recognize each other through the elements represented on their garments, such as mountains, rivers, lakes, birds, or plants from their region. These textiles function as bodily landscapes, mapping identity and ecological belonging through material and symbolic form. In this sense, the textiles from this area embody the territory itself, extending the clothing's second skin to signify home. In doing so, the wearer becomes an integral part of the territory, both part and embodiment of it.

My friend Araceli and I met in the Sierra Mixteca (Oaxaca, Mexico). Proudly Indigenous, she carries with her ancestral stories and knowledge. She told me that the mountain in front of her village exists because it has been interconnected with her community since the beginning of time. If the mountain disappears, so does the village, and vice versa. Clothing in this region represents the metaphor of the body becoming a hill, a territory that gathers the stories of a community, the circular ecology and interdependence that a group of people can build with nature, just like Plant Man. According to this logic, I wonder what would happen if humanity lost land. How many stories and lives would disappear? The challenge is not to resist the attacks of global warming and the rising of the seas; it is to face the loss of a part of us.

Wearing plants led me into a process of embodiment, as Csordas describes it: "the existential basis of culture,” guiding me to recognize plants as a central axis of social reorganization. Through this experience, I engaged with people in ways that extended beyond the performance space, offering a holistic, ecological perspective on plant life and its relationship with society. By integrating performance with plant life and textiles, my work enacts circularity not just as metaphor, but as practice. Materials, meanings, and relationships are continually regenerated and recontextualized. The performance process resists linear structures, generating ongoing cycles of meaning and transforming the extractivist frameworks. Consequently, Plant Man becomes a site of relational reciprocity, where sustainability and interdependence unfold in real time. Audience members become co-creators of meaning and material transformation, whether through acts of care (watering and singing to plants) or storytelling. This cyclical exchange challenges the ephemerality of performance, embedding it in lived experience and communal memory.

If the body is a site of inscription, how does it retain its territorial significance when displaced? My performance reflects on this question, particularly in the context of migration. In 2022, while preparing for my migration to the United States, I could no longer care for Plant Man, so I performed one final piece with my plants. It was a symbolic act in which I offered my vegetal body to friends and family. One by one, audience members stepped onto the stage and took a part of me. All at once, they tore the plants from my lungs, heart, and lower back. Each fragment of my body, each story contained within it, was pulled away, like roots detaching during migration, taking its own path to find a home with my loved ones.

After my departure, those who had taken the plants sent me messages:

“Look, I have your heart here. I water it every three days,
as you asked, and it’s growing very well.”

“Look, I have your arm here. It has stretched out and
embraced my wall; it’s growing beautifully.”

This process of fragmentation and dispersal echoes the rupture experienced in migration, the severing of embodied ties to place and the challenge of reconstituting them in unfamiliar territories. The multiple voices converge in the body/territory and then expand into unpredictable branches, growing throughout life like an echo of what once might have been called unity.

The interconnection experienced in this act of body/territory and subsequent uprooting is an essential dichotomy for understanding rhizomatic thinking in contrast to the hierarchical structure of the tree format. I analyze this act of abandoning the center of the fragmented body scattered across the universe, as part of the ontological forgetting of unity. How can we forget what is part of us? At what point did the body forget that it is part of the whole?