MADELEINE KATE MCGOWAN – Planting Songs

Lend your voice to the plants – collective singing

Planting Songs is a series of songs that bring local plants to life – their qualities, characteristics, and hidden abilities. Performance artist Madeleine Kate McGowan has invited a number of composers to create songs that give voice to the plants and make them present through music, text, and shared singing.

You are invited into a collective vocal play, where new communal songs and traditions can take root. At a time when we must reinvent the ways we are together, Planting Songs explores how singing can become a sensory and embodied way of learning, remembering, and connecting to the world.

Each song carries knowledge about a specific local plant – its properties, lifeways, and relationships. When we sing the plants, this knowledge is stored in the body. In this way, the song becomes both a transmission, a living archive, and a practice of creating closeness between humans and the more-than-human world.

Planting Songs points toward a new ecological song tradition, where voice, memory, and community are woven together. A poetic and participatory work that explores how art can strengthen our cultural and ecological resilience by teaching us to remember, sense, and relate to the plants we live among.

ABOUT MADELEINE KATE MCGOWAN

Madeleine Kate McGowan is a Irish/Danish artist and director working across performance, sound, text, ecology, and social choreography. Her practice explores how art can function as resistance, a sensory space, and a site for collective processing in times marked by ecological crisis, loss, and collapse.

Through works such as Solastalgia, she creates poetic and speculative formats in which difficult emotions can take shape, and where art opens a space for imagining other ways of living, grieving, and coexisting.

She often works collaboratively across art, biology, and local communities, developing site-responsive and participatory works that connect the more-than-human world with embodied experience, memory, and ecological imagination.

PRACTICAL INFO

Duration: 60 min.
Participants: 30
Age: All
Language: Danish

The piece is rooted in vocal work. Everyone is welcome, and every voice can participate. All it takes is a willingness to dive in.

Photo: Christian Friedländer