Art historian Suvi Vepsä and artist Egle Oddo have been collaborating since 2021. In this dialogue, they move towards an understanding of realism from a more-than-human perspective by introducing the concept of operational realism, as coined by Oddo, to describe a form of imagination-in-practice that moves away from gaze as the primal informant of reality. By demystifying the relation between Realism and visual representation, the dialogue facilitates a re-focusing on process art. Their long-term commitment to and around gardening exemplifies how the sense of touch includes worlds of a multitude of bodies and purposefully queers up the concept of realism.