Join author Jessica J. Lee and visual artist and researcher Iman Datoo for a conversation with Invasion Ecology co-curator Jelena Sofronijevic about how plants and people cross borders and come to belong - or not - as they do so.
This event is part of Invasion Ecology: online conversations - a series of discussions with artists and writers around the themes of the group exhibition Invasion Ecology. The exhibition, presented by Radical Ecology and Southcombe Barn, questions what we mean by ‘native’ and what it means to belong - reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals and landscapes.
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of three books of nature writing, Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and Dispersals, the children’s book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and was Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and the University of King’s College.
Iman Datoo is an artist with a background in collaborative projects combining arts, science, and technology. She is also a researcher at Radical Ecology. Iman’s creative approach is grounded in storytelling and world-building. Her work is time-based and she is drawn to subjects and ideas that challenge notions of the binary, looking to imagine a dynamism of relations beyond hegemonic systems. She is artist-in-residence with the Eden Project and University of Exeter’s Environment & Sustainability Institute (2023-24). Recent works include Soil-Brain, Gut-Brain (2023) and Kinnomic Botany (2020-22).
Jelena Sofronijevic is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher, who makes content at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts. They are the Contemporary Art Curator at The Box in Plymouth and co-curator of Invasion Ecology (2024), and they produce EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art. They also produce historicity, a new series of audio walking tours exploring how cities got to be the way they are, recorded on location in London (2022) and Tokyo (2023), and works in print. Jelena’s full portfolio is available on their website, Instagram, and Twitter.