Free Radicals present Ways of Growing / Modos de crescer – a culmination of the two-year research project exploring the intersections between plant biodiversity and artistic practice. The exhibition is on display at the Gallery of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (FBAUL) until 28th November 2026. 

What can we learn about planetary well-being—and our responsibilities towards it—if plants become participants in the knowledge production that emerges from artistic inquiry and cultural work? How do we even create a space that invites different ways of knowing (and by that we mean the entire multispecies ecosystem both plants and humans are part of) into sustained dialogue that generates insights that none could achieve alone? Perhaps responding to the biodiversity crisis requires us to rethink not only the very notion of nature, but humanity’s place within it. If the default setting is to overlook plants and their contribution to worldmaking, let us cultivate plant literacy as a way of subverting that default.

Titled Ways of Growing / Modos de crescer, the show brings together works of twenty artists, designers, creative practitioners and interdisciplinary researchers tracing their situated responses to the current European ecological realities from eucalyptus monocultures in Portugal and forest loss in Armenia to the transformation of vernacular knowledge in Galicia's mountain communities. Through image making, textile embroidery, sound, olfactory compositions, video art or mixed media, they ask how to invite plants into artistic inquiry as co-creators of collective imagination rather than subjects of study or objects on display, opening up broader questions of reciprocity, attention and the kinds of worlds we make with plants. 

Featuring works by Blanca Allegue, Kač Bártková, Aly Beveridge, Morgane Billuart, Gabriela Carvalho, Alejandra Díaz-Guerra Acedo, Eleonora Edreva, Elena Falomo, Maria Ilieva, Adam Kvaček, Joana Manaia, Jamie McGhee, Ricardo Nugra Madero, Ivana Papić, Béatrice Pépin, Inês Quente, Emilie Rážová, Miguel Tavares, Daria Titova, and Yanna Varbanova.