Demonstrating the Agency of Plants: An Interview with Diana Lelonek

diana_lelonek_polityka.jpg, default, Diana Lelonek, photo: Leszek Zych / Polityka, Demonstrating the Agency of Plants: An Interview with Diana Lelonek

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The ‘Centre for Living Things’ raises questions about the status of waste-derived environments: Should plants growing on waste be removed and disposed of along with their ecosystems? This question is posed by an artist who explores the relationships between humans and other organisms.

Diana Lelonek’s interdisciplinary projects, situated as they are at the intersection of art and science, are a critical response to the processes of overproduction and humanity’s relationship with nature. The exhibition Centre for Living Things is currently on display in the heart of the city during the Belfast Photo Festival 2025. We discuss various topics with the artist, including a succulent plant causing a plastic bottle to burst, plant partnerships, as well as her role as a guest in ecosystems and her drawing energy from them.

Agnieszka Warnke: Would you rather reduce or produce?

Diana Lelonek: I try to seek out existing forms. The Centre for Living Things focuses on the study of collected waste plants.

AW: It all started with a bottle found in Białowieża Forest…

DL: I remember that moment as a turning point. It was 2016, shortly before the logging of the forest began; we had an outdoor workshop for our doctoral studies at the University of Arts in Poznań. That was when I found a few objects, including a bottle with a garden growing inside it. Now that visitors to the forest leave behind so many things, its resonance has changed somewhat. In fact, wherever it might be, when I find shoes covered in moss, I immediately associate such a finding with the tragic situation at the border. It is both fascinating and frightening to observe how the contexts of abandoned objects change.

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From ‘Centre for Living Things’ series by Diana Lelonek, photo: courtesy of artist

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AW: The Polish section of the Belfast Photo Festival is presented under the title ‘Metamorphosis’. How has your project evolved?

DL: It evolved alongside the conclusions drawn from my observations. I visited wild, illegal forest landfills in Poland, and then, after presenting the project in various locations, I received invitations to other countries to conduct research on waste plants. I observed how these landfills differed from one another, noting their specific characteristics and the species that inhabited various types of substrates. I always focused on the relationship between plant tissues and non-living objects, without delving into sociological issues. The project’s aim was to explore the phenomenon from the standpoint of nonhuman beings and nature. In this respect, it’s very thoroughly worked through.

AW: So, where did you find more waste plants than in Poland?

DL: [laughs] Actually, you can find this kind of phenomenon everywhere. It didn’t matter whether it was Warsaw, Belgrade, or Basel. In Switzerland, for instance, the curators suggested that I bring waste from Poland. It was amusing because I was imagining that the litter that had travelled from the West to the East would be returning as art.

I can see how the scale of wild landfills, even in the vicinity of Warsaw, has changed over the years. Fortunately, some of them have been cleaned up. However, the Centre for Living Things raises questions about the status of waste-derived environments: Should plants growing on rubbish be cleaned up and thrown away along with their ecosystems, or not? It’s a difficult question to answer. Often, these sites are also interesting in terms of the species that live there. I look at this from multiple perspectives. Nature has been seriously altered by destructive human activities, and that’s what I aim to show.

AW: You show how these spheres intertwine. Is it still possible to separate what’s human from what’s plant?

DL: I think so. I suppose that if you tidied up such an area, it would benefit the earth, as microplastics would stop entering the groundwater and heavy metals from electronic waste would no longer contaminate the soil. I try to view things from the perspective of nature as it emerges in such wastelands, areas on the fringe of what we call nature – nature as we like it, which is pretty and well-tended. My aim is to illustrate the great activity and agency of plants and various organisms and to draw attention to the fact that this is something from which we can learn to appreciate what nature is today.

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From ‘Centre for Living Things’ series by Diana Lelonek, photo: courtesy of artist

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AW: The ‘Centre for Living Things’ also combines an artistic approach with a scientific one.

DL: I truly wanted this to be that way. Even the name itself was intended to suggest that it wasn’t so much an artistic project as a research endeavour. I created a scientific and natural-science database and collaborated with people who specialise in botany. I still visit such places, feel them and continue working with plants, but in a slightly different way. I don’t treat them as research samples but more as partners. These are ecosystems in which I’m only a guest and from which I try to draw energy.

AW: In Belfast, your project can be seen in the city centre. This interaction appears intriguing: unwanted objects are discarded by humans, end up in the plant ecosystem, where a certain symbiosis occurs, and then they return to the human world.

DL: The series of photographs is displayed in front of the town hall, where there is a large, typically urban lawn, neatly mowed. The contrast between the well-kept city centre and the waste plants will be clearly visible.

I’ve recently found a lot of waste plants around Belfast, including one with a cowboy hat covered in moss. The climate there is quite humid, so if you leave any object lying around, it quickly becomes coated in moss. You can even observe this in the centre of Belfast – the walls of some buildings are green. This is why the curator decided on this particular project.

I previously collected objects from landfills and took them to a botanical garden, thereby removing them from their original context. Now, when I’m invited somewhere, I propose the opposite: a walk to the urban thickets that we typically avoid but where very interesting things occur. Recently, in Amsterdam, at the Zone2Source gallery located in a park established during the Floriade Expo in the 1970s, we created a garden of waste plants that will remain there as long as the gallery has the consent of the site manager.

AW: A book titled ‘Atlas of Waste Plants’, a type of post-herbarium, has also been published.

DL: That was just a form of playing with convention. It came from my observation and desire to play with the classic scientific classification, which is a human construct. The need to name and describe everything is useful for various studies or practical plant protection; however, they’re classified as desirable and undesirable. I wanted to open this up a bit, so I proposed a classification of waste environments in the Atlas of Waste Plants, such as, for instance, ‘post-shoe environments’ or ‘rock-like substrates’. This is not just artistic fantasy but rather things backed up by observation and collaboration with women scientists.

What I found interesting was that not only mosses and fungi try to find a function for themselves in this waste but so do the effects of human overproduction, which begin to circulate freely in the system and are now independent of human will. They start to visually resemble rocks or tree bark. This works both ways, as illustrated in the photos: sometimes it’s difficult to recognise what the object was, yet the same species, such as lichens, can appear on both dead wood bark and upholstery foam. Waste pretends to be something different from what it truly is.

AW: Is that why you didn’t photograph these objects in their ‘natural’ environment but instead without a context, against a white background, as in product photography?

DL: I also have photos that I took on site. This project is rich in various types of documentation, including both pictures of landfills and macro nature shots. However, I had the impression that it was difficult to observe the details of individual waste plants in the kind of mass that’s found in the landfill. I decided to adopt a product convention because these are post-product environments. The convention of advertising photography presents waste plants as attractive products or as archaeological documentation for museum purposes. It was important to me to take them out of context, to see how amazingly they begin to function. I didn’t want it to look like an investigative report from a landfill, of which there are many. I wanted to say something different.

AW: Which is the ‘Centre for Living Things’, and photography kills, in a sense.

DL: It captures a moment.

AW: Preserves and immortalises?

DL: The photographs we’re looking at now [the artist points to the photographic images in her studio, ed.] and those displayed in Belfast date from 2017 to 2019. They were taken before the waste plants found their way into the botanical garden, where they grew and evolved. Some species disappeared, while new, local ones emerged. Photography was the only tool to capture them at a particular moment. It would be impossible to transform them into an unchanging object of art, because they’re constantly in a state of flux.

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From ‘Centre for Living Things’ series by Diana Lelonek, photo: courtesy of artist

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The same applies to landfills – they’re undergoing processes of decomposition, erosion and overgrowth. For example, the photo of the bottle illustrates the force with which the plant bursts through the plastic – it’s a succulent, sedum, which likes dry places and can be found, for instance, on tram tracks.

AW: What’s happening with the waste plants now?

DL: They’re in an allotment garden – I bought it specifically so that they could grow somewhere. What was I supposed to do with them? Take them back to where I’d found them – in other words, ‘litter’ the place? Treat them like rubbish and throw them away? I feel responsible for them.

The area near my allotment garden will be developed by a new property developer, so I encourage everyone to visit the wasteland around Czerniakowskie Lake while it still exists. It’s beautiful, although unfortunately very littered, and many animal and plant species can also be found there. Sooner or later, ecosystems like this are doomed to be removed and built upon. Wild nature in cities should be protected and preserved; these areas are valuable, and our cities need them.

I work in an ambivalent field. Some might say I’m crazy because it’s a waste, it pollutes the ecosystem, and I completely agree. Others will tell me that pulling out waste plants is cruel because now the bryophytes on that shoe will suffer. The project is also about the fact that there are areas that remain undefined. I find that this new nature, which exists beyond our field of vision in spaces called wastelands, is an extremely interesting site for experimentation.

AW: In the ‘Centre for Living Things’ and other projects, you combine artistry with activism.

DL: Many of these projects arise from a need to protest, born of sadness or some form of dissent, a desire to preserve certain things before they vanish. Photography and video are the most desirable artistic tools for this purpose. It’s a form of activism that I can engage in without experiencing burnout; I can continue taking action and feel positive about it.

Photography is one of the many tools utilised to discuss climate change. Some people are good at writing journalistic articles, others are active in politics, and still others are courageous and determined enough to participate in direct protest, crossing the boundaries of the law. People often risk their lives travelling to conflict zones, where they document deforestation, for example. I employ conceptual art, which is not strictly reportage but more my interpretation. I treat it as a research tool for observation and drawing conclusions.

AW: What conclusions have you drawn from this project?

DL: I was guided in my work by the nature of ruins and wastelands. Showing what poor, excluded and unprotected nature is when left to its own devices. I had a mission: to draw attention, for the benefit of the ecosystem and the restoration of degraded land, to the precarious, unpaid work of plants and nonhuman beings with whom we share an urban space. Sometimes it’s enough to give them space, not take away every green area in the city, so that they can function.

‘Metamorphosis’ is a series of exhibitions, events and screenings taking place as part of the Belfast Photo Festival and focusing on the changing landscape of Polish ecology and society. Thanks to the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, installations created in collaboration with Polish artists Diana Lelonek, Anna Zagrodzka, Karol Szymkowiak, Dyba and Adam Lach and Fotofestiwal Łódź can be seen in key locations in central Belfast from 5 to 30 June 2025. The events are part of the UK/Poland 2025 cultural season organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute and the British Council.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

Language English