Read Michael Wang’s commissioned essay for HABITABLE ZONES, “The Alien Earth: Bogosi Sekhukhuni”
a little bit about the functions of gardens.
I wonder about the kinds of societal uses that hegemonic projects map onto garden architectures.
More often than not, gardens are communication tools.
Amongst what is commonly expressed is a love and admiration of the natural world, including the desire to be closer to it. A form of closeness that also seeks to surveil, centering the experiences of human cultural life in the modern state.
Following this observation, it can be argued that gardens perform as expressions of ideology. Loosely speaking, concepts of nature that dominate Western worlds have Euro-Colonial origins, William Cronin reminds us of the Judeo-Christian moralities that inspire associations of wilderness as something to be tamed or preserved.
one of the ways that gardens have colonial functions exists somewhere in the extended logic of colonial expansion and domination over geography and geology.
In a paper published in the journal Global Change Biology in 2022, Christopher Lyon et al point out that insufficient data exists for climate modeling beyond this century. The paper shares the results of three emission scenarios projected for 2500. These emission scenarios are based on three of the four Representative Concentration Pathways established in the early 2010s by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, each representing a scenario of “strong, moderate, and weak global climate policy”.
Their models describe an increasingly inhospitable planet - the extremes described in this paper not only inspire concepts of adaptation amongst other things; extreme contexts can be useful conceptual levers for innovative thinking in preparing for life in a hostile or inhospitable world.
HABITABLE ZONES draws from a larger research project that began in 2019; studying astronomical records of past solar activity as well as the current Solar cycle. Our Sun has a cycle based on periodic increases and decreases in solar magnetic activity. The flux of solar magnetic activity creates exchanges with earth’s magnetic field, producing telecommunications-disrupting geomagnetic storms and auroral transformations.
The monitoring of this activity is what is known as space weather. Much like space weather, the field of heliobiology studies the impact of solar radiation on terra objects. For the purposes of my research scope [a transdisciplinary position I describe as a “geo-socio technique”] heliobiology refers to both the neologism created by Soviet-era scientist Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky, who theorized about the “historio-psychological” effects of solar cycles, and aspects of studies in photosynthesis, biochemistry, microbiology and astrobiology.
The latter grouping of scientific research associated with heliobiology make up the focus of HABITABLE ZONES and provides a scientific context for a curiosity about the life of a path of solar-originating photons.
The installation is orientated around the 4 modes of metabolism, with the initial intention of highlighting living systems existing in and around photosynthetic metabolisms. The installation is collectively described as an “ante-garden” - a kind of meta-garden less purposed towards traditional human ‘needs’ around gardens but is instead intended to exist as a critique of dominant, colonial expressions of gardens.
“Ante-gardens” put a stress on aerobic experiences through the selection of plant and bacteria that will each represent a different mode of metabolism [photoautotrophs, chemoautotrophs, photoheterotrophs, chemoheterotrophs], and include plant species that do not produce oxygen in photosynthesis for example. The envisioned central work is a suspended arrangement of Rhodopseudomonas Palustris, a species of purple bacteria that is of interest to industry for its ability to adopt all 4 modes of metabolism depending on the environment.
for millions of years, the sun fed cyanobacteria – for millions of years, bacteria might have wondered about their place in the cosmos.
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