Estado Vegetal, a Gesture of Imitation

Abstract

‘Estado Vegetal, a Gesture of Imitation: An Interview with Manuela Infante' features a conversation between theatre playwright, director, scriptwriter and musician, Manuela Infante, and art historian and curator Laurel V. McLaughlin concerning Infante's most recent one-woman show, Estado Vegetal (vegetative state), 2018 in resonance with Timothy Morton's concept of ‘ecognosis', or attunements to ecological realities. Infante's play offers radical hope, within what Timothy Morton understands as the ‘dark-sweet'-structural, ideological, and philosophical ‘loops' beyond the human. Infante and McLaughlin discuss the performative techniques of Estado Vegetal that compose such hope in four parts: vegetable beginnings through object-oriented ontology, the branching structure of Infante’s play, the actants that punctuate and even orchestrate the action, and the existential notion that the theatre was never human.