This paper is about initiating a process of augmentation. The subject of this augmentation is the compound, technical term “greenhouse superstructure”. The process is initiated here by deposing the matter of colonial memory that is entrenched within this term. The deposition takes form as a brief genealogy, an account of related artworks, and a hypothesis about the destabilisation of this technological apparatus. Its passages and components outline the subtle and insidious dialectics of accelerated climate change that are converged and suppressed as an impasse within the very envelop of the term - physically, conceptually, metaphorically. In doing so, I discuss how the discourse, my artworks, and other interventions may reveal, emancipate, and display these entrenched conditions beyond the visual and technological privileges of the “greenhouse”. I thereon argue that these destabilising formats of sculptural display may be referred to as Anarchives, Site-Specific Greenhouse Superstructures, and, ultimately, as Social (Hyperobjective) Pedestals.
Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures is a doctoral work that supplements the unfinished modern opus The Arcades Project [in German Das Passagen-Werk (Mit Bindestrich und Werk mit Capital W) ]. The supplement takes the form of a sculptural, historical, and technological deposition of ‘greenhouse’ that presently oscillates between a past-background and future-foreground to Walter Benjamin's ‘theatrical’ handling of the Parisian arcades. From my Caribbean perspective, that oscillating treatment of ‘greenhouse’ affords me a prop from which to activate the following question: is colonial memory the drive of Global Warming? That core question has led me to retrospectively hypothesise that the technology of ‘greenhouse’ is—beyond metaphor—the illusory (dis)embodiment of the toxic binaries of interior & exterior that are still shaping various influential frameworks such as the modern & Marxian ideas of superstructure, as well as the past & future of Western natural sciences (and their histories). Because of that illusory, spectral, if paranormal power, ‘greenhouse’ becomes at once the Western colonial enframing to both the messianic promise for conserving biological history, as well as the messianic remedy to suppress the traumæ that are destining Global Warming. Also, because of that potent (dis)embodied character, the robust analysis of the manifold instrumentalisation of ‘greenhouse’ is set to play a primary role in deposing the geological timeline of the Anthropocene. Now, while the book-supplement is itself the dissertation (as an unpacking of the aforementioned hypothetical findings), the PhD also relies on two other research devices that are worth mentioning: an installation (titled Anarquivo Negantrópico), and an online journal (titled Intransitive Journal). Altogether, the dissertation offers a field from which to asses my broader experimentation with infrastructures, epistemic things, and social pedestals. Moreover, the dissertation revises the so-called forgotten list of ‘Epistemologica’ (the categorical of Western display preparations and phenomenotechnologies) so to format my study and practice into an adaptable, careful, and differentiated kind of epistemológica…a careful study and practice that we may share as object-relations that proportionately (dis)play more-than-human perspectives for (re)mediating the forms and forces of the climate crises.
Through an artistic contribution, Luis Berríos-Negrón introduces his project “Earthscore Specularium,” developed at Färg fabriken in Stockholm in 2015. The work of Berríos-Negrón departs from a practice that deals with complexity to reflect upon notions that bring together ecology, art, architecture, science, and social practice. In recent years, he has been developing a set of conceptual devices he ultimately refers to as “social pedestals.” The latter consist of a series of architectonical installations that facilitate social encounters by resolving spatial practicalities, and at the same time reflect conceptually upon the dematerialization of sculpture. The “social pedestal” is conceived as a site for networked agency for social transformation, where the roles of the agents involved can permute, and different configurations can be organized depending of the needs of every specific situation. The “greenhouse”—which Luis treats as a social pedestal itself as well—is a long-term research site of the artist on the possibility of emancipating this type of technology in order to obtain anticipatory spatial, artistic, and social media.
Greenhouse is an opaque manifold of meanings. The opacity is not just the result of a layering that occurs when considering its many definitions. It is more so the result of the suppressed colonial violence that is implicit in its technological instrumentalization. This mythical violence, of willfully transplanting the exotic, is at the heart of allother compound terms and subsets of ‘greenhouse’. I have been working on how this opacity obscures a range of forces that shape the environment. More specifically, I amexploring how these opaque forces affect, and may be perceived through, the forms and languages of sculptural and spatial production beyond prescribed visual or imagined outcomes. The work you will encounter here is then a probe to test how the violent opacity of greenhouse may be demystified by shaping an index as potential format for dematerialized display.
In this paper I will propose that greenhouse superstructures are not just the surface envelop of an industrial typology: they are more so a spatial archetype. As such, they are historiographical boundary objects that at times display the spatiotemporal dimensions and geopolitical flows of environmental form in accelerated climate change. This abovementioned hypothesis is reflected through the manifold of “resilience” as defined by Prof. Lawrence Vale - of resilience being “a window into conflicting human values”. The aim of this effort is to ultimately centre the manifold notion of “greenhouse” as an index that points away from itself towards the impact of anthropological and technocratic ideologies on agricultural and spatial production. It is these binary ideologies that arguably create what we sense to be a crisis of scale, now further articulated as the hyperobject of climate change as a disjuncture that we nostalgically entertain as a chasm between the human condition and the living environment. Parsed by augmenting the notion of 'greenhouse superstructure' – as technology, gas, and effect – the hypothesis looks to articulate the greenhouse as a 'site-specific non-local' sensation on the expanding sculptural field. What this expanding sculptural netherworld implies needs to be rigorously addressed for it may very well become what tautologically heightens the greenhouse to the providence of becoming our future atmosphere and landscape. To elaborate this potentiality, I will first present the schematics and precedents of the dissertation, including four installations of my authorship in Germany, Brazil, and Sweden. These sections then lead to an argument instantiated by thinking of the greenhouse as 'social pedestal'. The objective is therefore to embody the notion of non-local site-specific resilience as modes of pedagogy and production that aspire to destabilise the anthropological machine, as resilient modes not limited to historic, scientific, artistic, correlational, nor speculative conventions.
In this paper I aim to remind a brief projection about the inseparable difference between mental and physical space. This projection intends to thicken the aesthetics of sustainability by rejecting social Darwinism as the normalization of chaos and the irrational by way of evolutionary teleology and technocratic domination. To do so, I describe a mannerist recurrence in cultural production and how I hope it may inform a revitalized movement beyond an age of mass industrialization, beyond claims of Parametricism. I argue that this move can be activated by revising Charles Peirce’s Infinite Community of Inquiry, and Gerald Raunig’s notion of Abstract Machines, as vehicles for anthropocentric cybernetics and contemporary ecology. This is not about metaphorical relations between the visual arts and the hard sciences, but to set forth a topological heuristic, an ongoing inquiry to further categorize aspects between the human and non-human worlds, reflecting through Nietzsche's idea of 'gay science.'
This is a text contribution that briefly explores the political, spatial, and pedagogical dimensions of Tropical Modernism in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Walter Benjamin deemed his Arcades Project [Das Passagen-Werk (Mit Bindestrich und Werk mit Capital W)] “the theatre of all my struggles and all my ideas.” As a vast accumulation of materials, it had become for him a literary laboratory for testing social, critical, and spatial ideas. The co-authors here present an exposition where they look to reactivate that ‘theatre’ to search, test, and draw from each other alternative recursions for their respective practices. Their respective discourses are intersected through a voluntary 'trialogue' that plays between three different roles aiming to diverge from the traditional form of a Q&A. The exchanges gravitate around ‘greenhouse’ as the historiographic display structure to the Arcades, as well as to Global Warming. But, the format also triggers ‘indirections’ urging unforeseen aspects that may further research and revisions of the Arcades. For the authors, such indirections actualise and translate, yet again, other dormant aspects of each others perceptions about Benjamin. Ultimately, joined by the attitude to share and reactivate that ‘theatre-laboratory’ with you—the reader and exposition visitor—the actors look for cues that encourage further procedures of experimentation and reflexion.
I’ve wanted to talk to Walter Benjamin ever since encountering his Arcades Project. But – as much as that desire may be attune with Benjamin’s own commitment to bringing the past forth to the present – I can’t. I therefore turn to Arcades translator, and Benjamin scholar, Howard Eiland... and, it was inevitable that I had to return to the Arcades, not just because Benjamin meticulously objectified the glass and iron arcades as method and catalyst of research, but because, to me, ‘greenhouse’ does precede, and succeed, the arcades themselves as display and index of what was, and is to become of ‘natural history.’ For 'Legacy' I share excerpts of an interview (soon to be published entirely) that started at the Harvard Co-op in 2016; a conversation that continues to this day, by way of intermittent emails and other correspondence.