I Hate the Plant, the Plant Hates Me and I Want to Become Her
Imagine a greenhouse where strawberries grow on human blood.
Drawing from her experience of living with rare and severe allergies, Margherita Soldati stages an impossible relationship between an allergic body and the plant it desires but cannot eat. In an attempt to bring the plant closer to her own body, she began growing strawberry plants using her blood as part of their nourishment, asking whether changing the conditions in which they grow could change their relationship to her.
Performance times 20:30 - 21:00 22:30 - 23:00The work expands this experiment into a fictional greenhouse, where the desire to control the conditions of an allergic body meets the increasing control involved in contemporary food production: regulating light, temperature, water and nutrients to keep plants growing and productive. Blood, agriculture and desire become intertwined, blurring the boundaries between cultivating a plant, transforming it and becoming entangled with it.
By feeding the strawberry plants with her own blood, Soldati pushes these logics to an extreme, asking whose bodies, resources and environments are exhausted in the pursuit of productivity and abundance.
I Hate the Plant, Margherita Soldati, GMO Museum Night 2026 -
Margherita Soldati
Her practice operates at the intersection of ecology, immunology, and political infrastructures of care, treating the body as a research apparatus where environmental, agricultural, and medical systems intersect. She explores how regimes of optimization, sterility, and control shape organic life and human subjectivity. Working across greenhouses, laboratories, and galleries, she engages materials like plants, soil, and blood as active participants—sustaining tensions between care and control, intimacy and antagonism. Enlarge
Margherita Soldati - Portrait -
Information
Performance + Installation 7 November Performance times: 20:30 - 21:00 22:30 - 23:00 Mediamatic & TestTafel RestaurantPart of GMO: How far are you willing to mutate? during Museumnight Amsterdam 2026.
For questions program@mediamatic.nl.
