Nishant Shah
A technology is a means….
During the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic, a friend living in Australia, sent me three small plants, delivered from a local farm in the Netherlands. I was horrified. I have famously not been a plant person. Plants in the past have given up on me and rushed to their early withering. I didn’t know if I had the capacity to take care of another life form while we were all so anxious about life and living. My friend assured me that these were plants that thrived on neglect and that they are self-soothing. ‘They are almost like the cats of the plant worlds’ she assured me. I conceded. And it was a huge surprise to me that she was right. Because I was so paranoid that the plants would die on me, and because there was nobody else in the house to look after them, I perhaps did pay more attention to their care and watering on a regular basis. And the plants thrived. They grew. They were optimistic on my window seal. I don’t remember when it happened but these plants became means of reflection for me. Every evening, I would look at the news of the day, listening to the recap of the global devastation, and look at the plants.
Image by wildpixel from Getty Images
In a world where there was so much anxiety and conversations with friends and communities were so fraught with precariousness, the plants, their survival, their living, their thriving, became a conversation piece.
My plants became ways of connecting with and thinking through the lockdown conditions – I am not a romantic but they made me feel less alone, and I am not a gardener but it connected me with people, who, even though they had not seen the plants, became strangely and intensely invested in their well being.
These plants, for me, became a means of managing the personal space of the pandemic, becoming the anchor points of domesticity, and a shared connection from people all distributed and distanced as a part of the regulation.
The plants themselves were not technologies in how we understand them. But in my pandemic conditions, based on my contexts and relationalities, they became means to manage both my convergences and separations. They were material objects, but to many who only heard about them, who only saw them on screens, or just talked about them, they were metaphors, they were ideas, they were imaginations, they were life forms of a distant nature.
The plants continue to be plants. And now that I have moved home, they perhaps cease to be immediate technologies, but they still remain encoded with a new function – a function of technological mediation and reflection – which has changed them, and changed my own relationship with plants.