Microlandscapes

The microlandscapes function as a tool to narrate spaces through the invisible relationships of those who inhabit them, directing the gaze toward what escapes normative representations of space and interspecies relations. This practice distorts a scientific technique originally intended to cultivate organisms for definitional purposes—to isolate and classify biological samples—and reorients it toward the creation of speculative landscapes that overflow into promiscuous and deviant ecologies.

The microlandscape invites movement across scales as a method of research and critical fabulation. From this perspective, the relationships between the different elements that constitute these territories are twisted, and the separation between the organic and the artificial becomes blurred, to the point of making it impossible to discern what precedes and what follows a nature already intervened in by multiple agencies.

In this way, the generative—and regenerative—capacity of post-natural assemblages is reclaimed as a means of giving rise to new configurations that integrate biotic and abiotic entities. These configurations embody ways of inhabiting the planet in its current moment: a reality in which both our bodies and the ecosystems we traverse are constantly modulated by synthetic agents that reconfigure our biologies and ecologies.

A microlandscape is a suspended place, composed of improbable existences and divergent becomings. Temporarily confined within the boundaries of organic matter that grows, changes, and decomposes, it is marked by its own impermanence. It represents geographies of bodies in potential, challenging their conditions of normativity in an emerging environment. In Earth-embodied microlandscapes, these territories are reconstructed through the memory of the fragment, which is activated when joined with other fragments of reality. In doing so, they explore a new post-natural condition within artifice, generating speculative landscapes of existences and relationships that suggest new scenarios of possibility. The indeterminacy of what grows and develops in the microlandscape evokes the capacity of organisms to adapt to a transforming environment. Within the fragility of a constantly changing micro-ecosystem, the microlandscape engages in dialogue with its own impermanence.

Specs:
The video installation consists of two videos with audio (the audio is the same for both channels). The projections can be placed on juxtaposed or opposing surfaces (in the latter case, the intention is to create a space that the audience can pass through). The two projections should be played in sync to ensure the audio matches.

Video link

As a research tool, Holobiont Anarchives enables the mapping of collective experiences in a situated and relational approach. This methodology addresses the micropolitics of affect, collective memory, historical and ecological damages, multispecies relations, and the links between a collective body and its territory, adopting a non-anthropocentric, transecofeminist, and queer perspective.

Photo Credits: Luna Coppola. Workshop with Arquea Colectivo at Einxs Pro.