Film

“At its core, my guiding thread is a plea against mechanistic worldviews. In science, plants are still treated like objects—passive beings where water goes in at the bottom and CO₂ at the top. It’s a major step to acknowledge that a plant is more than that: it communicates, forms networks, and is a living subject. It’s hard to grasp—but plants act autonomously." – Florianne Koechlin, Author and Biologist

“With insects, we know that the noses are their antennae. We know what receptors are there, we know how these receptors perceive these volatiles, how they process them, and how they combine all this information. In plants, we know that they perceive that but we don’t know exactly how. That’s the million-dollar question.” – Prof. Dr. Consuelo De Moraes, Head of Biocommunication Group, ETH Zurich

“When our food is treated like a disposable item nothing will change in the way we treat plants. But that doesn’t only apply to plants. It aQects animals and humans too. […] People don’t show much care for each other anymore. But we need to show more care. Urgently! We are plants too.” – Gerda Steiner, artist

“For a long time, our work has been about showing that the boundary between artificiality and ‘nature’ is total nonsense. Because that implies that ‘nature’ is in the forest and humans are separate, that they are totally diQerent things. But I’m sure that’s not the case. Because we are full of life and can’t escape what we call ‘nature’.” – Jörg Lenzlinger, Künstler

“Research on plant flowering goes back many centuries. We’ve been seeking the holy grail of plant research, that one specific substance that makes plants blossom immediately. The so-called “florigen”." – Dr. Emanuel Devers,  Senior Scientist Biocommunication Research Group, bee damage project, ETH Zurich