Neophyte – an Industrial Opera of Plants and Pioneers

Neophyte – an Industrial Opera of Plants and Pioneers is a multimedia installation by Lex Rütten & Jana Kerima Stolzer. The protagonists are wild plants, settled around former industrial places, that convey their migratory history through songs, developing a narrative about environments in a constant flux of growth and decay.

In degraded ecosystems, mainly plants not native to the region, called neophytes, can be found. As the pioneers who built the mines and factories on undeveloped land, now the plants, fungi, mosses and lichens are travelling and reclaiming new, often inhospitable places, displacing the native species along the way due to their robustness.
The multimedia opera allows these hardy botanical pioneers to take centre stage and tell their story of advancement, invasion and colonisation, but also of their future potential for the renaturalisation of these industrial wastelands.

Back