Courtesy FACT

Kay Carson took in video works about plants, globalisation and ways of life at FACT.

From Bruce Nauman to Vito Acconci, there is something rather hypnotic, seductive even, about repetition in performance art and video installations. A new exhibition by Anna Lucas at Liverpool’s FACT this summer also has those qualities, along with a political subtext.

Here and Your Here, running until August 19 2007, uses the botanical world to highlight social, scientific and even spiritual dynamics to get us thinking on both a local and global level.

Kaff Mariam (2007) and Una de Gato (2007), two of three pieces specially commissioned by FACT, offer up the biographies of two very different exotic plants, the first from the Middle East, the second from the Amazon, one of which is said in Creole lore to aid fertility, the other being researched as a potential treatment for cancer and Aids.

The cinematography is exquisitely still, calm, methodical - but loaded with subliminal economic messages. An elderly goat herd totes an Ikea bag in the wilderness, while in the rainforest, a tour guide’s shirt bears a Nestle symbol.

Courtesy FACT

Together, the works appear to be a tacit cry for help. One plant may bring life, while the other seeks to prevent death - but the bigger parallel is creeping globalisation and the dying out of traditional ways of life

The highlight of the exhibition is Atlantic Botanic (2007), a thoughtful piece which completes the exotic plant trilogy. A double screen shows us the reflective, academic world of the South London Botanical Institute to the left, while on the right is the coarse, bustling Brixton Market, where both Kaff Mariam and Una de Gato are sold and where botanist Lucas first came upon the plants.

The juxtaposition is stark, but the precise choreography and fixed camera positions make it very easy to savour these two diverse environments side by side. One shows the folds of an old map, while the other depicts a bunch of plump, yellow bananas. Books on rare orchids are reverentially moved to stand upright on a wooden shelf, while a box of red peppers is deftly arranged and positioned to maximum effect on a wooden table.

Courtesy FACT

At the close of day, the botanist quietly shuts his spectacles case and returns his files to their rightful places, while the market trader puts his boxes of fruit away and locks up his stall. There is ritual in both of them, a meticulousness of movement which obviously comes from years of practice. Both are unique, indigenous customs in work environments facing obsolescence in the age of global technology and consumerism. It is balletic, touching, poetry in motion.

Still on a repetitive theme, San Christobal - or St Christopher, patron saint of travellers - is an early experimental film by Lucas, shot from her student lodgings in Barcelona in 1992.

The grainy angular aerial views of the road by St Christopher’s Church show a priest blessing travellers with holy water and women offering lucky heather in exchange for a donation. For all its religious representation, the ritual is reminiscent of a McDonald’s drive-through - the rhythm of motorists pulling up, handing over their cash for nourishment of sorts, and speeding off. Golden arches or pearly gates… which has the most triumphant future?