Ku roślinnym ekologiom niepełnosprawności. Nie jestem rośliną, jestem z rośliny, jestem z rośliną: o ludzko-rośl-innych wspólnotach na marginesie solo performatywnego Aleksandry Skotarek "Nie jestem rośliną. Strumień świadomości"

Abstract

The aim of this article is to read Aleksandra Skotarek’s solo performance, "I Am Not a Plant: A Stream of Consciousness" (based on texts by Aleksandra Skotarek and Virginia Woolf, directed by Justyna Wielgus, with dramaturgy by Justyna Lipko-Konieczna; Warsaw, Teatr 21, premiere April 23, 2023), through the lens of “environmentalism of the injured”–a theoretical framework and simultaneously an ethical and political stance proposed by Sunaura Taylor. The environmentalism of the injured emphasizes the network of connections and relationships between human and more-than-human beings in the context of disability during times of socio-environmental and climatic crises. It underscores the ethical and political importance of “staying with the trouble,” which implies both recognizing and acknowledging the wrongs afflicting both human and nonhuman bodies, as well as the courage to draw alternative ways of living, sets of values, and practices from the experience of disability and living with the wound. Against the backdrop of critiques of the Vitruvian Man formulated from critical perspectives (particularly feminist theories, disability studies, plant and animal studies, and critical posthumanism), I present Taylor’s work and her intersectional analyses of disability, animality, and ecology to highlight the motif of plants, marginal in her work, as a potentially productive area for thinking about disability. I analyze the solo performance in relation to three signatures of the environmentalism of the injured: relationality, the ethics of living-with, and the struggle against inequality; in doing so, I demonstrate the necessity of remaining with the ambivalence of these categories, which cannot be inscribed into simple visions of an ideal world. Thus, the article proposes a shift toward plant ecologies of disability and a reflection on the potential of human-plant communities at the intersection of disability and the nonhuman, particularly plant life. It is an attempt to develop an ethical and political position that emphasizes the common conditions of life shared by humans and plants under capitalism, alongside an opposition to life-destroying, extractivist logic.