!['Making a Name' installed at the 'Super Natural' exhibition, Eden Project, Cornwall, 2022](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2ad4786f000e799acae4fadf616d9d3bb4d7025049c00b9cb2bdeda3ea838bcb/Iman-Datoo-s-Making-a-Name-at-the-Eden-Project.jpg)
Making a Name
Yukon Gold or yellow-as-the-tired-belly-of-the-lizard?Making a Name is an interactive and collaborative audio-installation. The artwork invites participants to consider new and enriched vocabularies for the naming and categorisation of plants through touch, imagination and play.
Participants are invited to pick up a potato, feel their eyes, and consider the textures of their skin. With these answers, they create a unique name for their potato: examples include beige-wise-whale, a violet shaft of stardust, and as surprised as a lost soul.
Making a Name seeks to open the fields of nomenclature and taxonomy to non-scientists of all ages. In centering invention, participants may consider what can be gained from attuning their senses to the vegetal world. Each name is a condensed form of knowledge; a record of an interaction rooted in observation and an antidote to reductionism.