Plant Tenders and Other Future Currencies is a project created for the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery about preparing for future disasters. With a future that feels increasingly insecure and large-scale emergencies likely, we are faced with the question of how to prepare for what lies ahead. What actions taken today might help us face the unknowable tomorrow?

Plant Tenders explores this question while wondering how preparing for an uncertain future operates collectively in the present. Could thinking and acting together with an eye to the future tend productively to relationships now? Or, said somewhat differently: If preparing for imagined futures invests us in those futures could we not use the act of preparing to move towards a future we want?

The project used a public survey about what plants the university community would want on campus in the case of disaster to initiate conversations around the future and its looming uncertainty. The plant that was selected by participants, Aloe vera, was distributed to appointed “plant tenders,” who were recruited to care for those plants on campus so that they will be available if needed in the future.