For millennia, gardens have been a medium with which to redeem nature from its ever-impending chaos. They play a key role in the survival strategies that art and culture can offer during the “age of the human.” Yet not all these strategies are the same: some of them, in fact, conceal forms of wildness or disorder that are rooted in systems of social oppression, resource exploitation, and the disruption of planetary cycles. Taking her cue from an encounter with the Augmented Reality artist Tamiko Thiel and her eco-activist works, Serenella Iovino uses the garden as a lens to analyze the impacts of old and new forms of aestheticizing nature on the geology of our planet. Iovino focuses on landscapes of power and depletion, but also the creativity and possibility that are emerging from places of resistance.
The essay is followed by a conversation with Tamiko Thiel.