Abstract
This thesis explores how Gerd Tinglums photographic series Usynliggjorte, utryddete og truede arter (Invisible, extinct and endangered species) from 1991 engages with the historical, present and potential future relationship between the vegetal and feminine. My exploration of the series is rooted in critical plants studies and ecofeminism as it focuses on the interconnected suppressive practices affecting both cultural and ecological groups, and the disruptive potential that can be found in a more vegetal and feminist approach to time, being and relationality. The photographic series consist of 30 portraits featuring a selection of ignored, forgotten and underappreciated female cultural figures that have been grafted together with rare, threatened, endangered and extinct plants from the Norwegian flora. Through grafting the feminine and vegetal together, the photographs question how women and plants have been conceptualized within western ontological structures, and disturbs the traditional ideas of the autonomous self, chronological and linear time, and relationality within and across species boundaries. Framing these discussions is the notion of the Anthropocene and Jeffrey Cohen’s concept of a grey ecology that fosters a place where the excluded, spectral and monstrous can dwell. I will argue that through an engagement with vulnerable cultural and ecological existences, Tinglum’s photographic series point towards alternative and productive ontological frameworks. These frameworks centre around a more interconnected, feminine, vegetal and metamorphosing way of being, alongside a hauntological notion of time and a vegetal form of relationality based on Irigaray’s notion of sharing in difference. My argument will encompass the series in its entirety, but will pay particular attention to four specific portraits in order to bring to bear a level of specificity in my account of the series. The four portraits will be discussed primarily in relation to the issue of vegetal temporality, identity and hospitality, where information about the depicted plants and women will be weaved into the discussion. The aim of this thesis is to show how an approach to women and plants rooted in ecofeminism and vegetal philosophy can prove productive in our ecologically and socially troubled presence, and explore how this is reflected in the way Gerd Tinglum’s photographic series questions and reformulates the traditionally devalued traits of the vegetal and feminine.