This live performance is built around the act of reading — a score structured as an alternating movement between two spaces. In Spot 1, the performer reads from Kobo Abe's short story Dendrocacalia (1949), a surrealist narrative in which an ordinary man begins, involuntarily, to transform into a plant. Written originally in Japanese, Tsuchimoto produced an unofficial translation for this exhibition — an act she describes as a kind of metamorphosis in itself, a temporary becoming-other while remaining oneself. In Spot 2, the performer offers reflections, theoretical framings, and biographical fragments that echo and complicate the fiction. These passages draw on the writing of Japanese ecologist Kinji Imanishi — whose concept of human-plant continuity recurs throughout Tsuchimoto's practice — and on the plant physiologist Kliment Timiryazev, whose 1912 work performs its title. Timiryazev argued that the difference between plants and animals is not of kind but of degree; the chloroplast, in his vision, is the cosmic link between the sun and all life. Running through both registers is a meditation on inheritance: what bodies carry across species, across generations, across languages — sweat as a bridge to botanical ancestors, fingers and tongues as messages from the dead, and the colonial history embedded in the naming of plants.
